Last March, Western Digital bought a small firm, Silicon Systems who manufacture SSD for specific professional markets. Since then, Western Digital was satisfied to change the name of the Silicon Systems products and to sell them under its own marque.
Even though this was is a good first step into this future market, this was not sufficient. Benefitting from results better than envisaged, the company announced that it was going to continue and intensify its investment in the market of SSD disks and to produce discs which more on the cutting edge.
Currently, there are already a good ten companies that produce SSDs, among them are giants such as Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, and manufacturers of memory such as OCZ, Corsair, Falcon… If one adds to them in the next years Seagate, Sandisk, Western Digital… One will arrive at a market where there will be too many players and that will be marred by fusions and buy outs.
It will certainly be necessary to await second half of the next decade to learn who will be the giants of the storage in the future. In this war, the manufacturers of flash memory will have an enormous advantage.
