Western Digital pays $65M for solid state drive maker

Western Digital Corp. Monday announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., a small, Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based maker of solid-state drives.

The acquisition brings Western Digital, a manufacturer of hard disk drives, into the fast-growing solid state drive market for the first time. SiliconSystems sells solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors. The embedded drives are targeted at the enterprise market.

"SiliconSystems' intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD's solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements," said Western Digital CEO John Coyne.

Founded in 2002, SiliconSystems has about 65 employees and said it has sold four million SiliconDrive products to the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets.

The SiliconSystems' product portfolio also includes a number of firmware and software products for protecting data, such as its PowerArmor for error-correction, SiSMART for self-monitoring and SiSecure for monitoring user access.

Computerworld

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