Western Digital Acquires SiliconSystems Inc. For $65 Million

Western Digital Corporation announced today that they have acquired SiliconSystems for $65 million in cash.  SiliconSystems is a small manufacturing company of solid-state drives (SSDs).  This instantly brings Western Digital into the solid-state drives market.  SSDs are commonly found in netbooks developed by Acer, Lenovo, HP, and Dell.

SiliconSystems develops SSDs with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces.  “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,” stated Western Digital CEO John Coyne.

SiliconSystems was started in 2002 and has about 65 employees.  So far, they have sold about 4 million SiliconDrive units to companies of various markets.

Seagate Technology LLC, the world’s largest hard drive company has not yet produced a solid-state disk drive, but after Western Digital made this acquisition, they may start looking into it.

[via ComputerWorld]

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