Thursday, January 2nd 2025
Solidigm Stops Consumer SSD Business, Operations Ended Last Year
According to ITHome, Solidigm has officially ended production of its P44 Pro and P41 Plus solid-state drives, marking its complete withdrawal from the consumer SSD market. These were the only consumer SSDs released under the Solidigm brand since the company's formation. The company has also removed all consumer drive listings from its website, which now focuses entirely on data center and enterprise storage solutions. The decision follows earlier developments in October 2023, when Solidigm reportedly dissolved its consumer SSD division and laid off staff working on consumer drives, Tom's Hardware learned from an unnamed source familiar with the matter. This has been reportedly done to stop consumer SSD development and re-route resources to enterprise SSD, which drives more revenue.
The shutdown reportedly occurred abruptly, just before the planned launch of a new consumer SSD that had already been distributed to reviewers. Consumer SSD space has been recording a lot of uncertainty recently, as larger brands have been able to launch consumer SSDs while enjoying profits from the enterprise buildout, and AI expansion is requiring massive storage units. These larger brands can distill some of their products into consumer-focused sections without much impact on margins, as the enterprise is willing to pay top Dollar for SSDs. Sadly, Solidgm has not chosen that path and is instead going all-in on the enterprise segment. Sadly, fewer SSD makers in the consumer space means less competition, so we hope that this trend doesn't continue.
Sources:
ITHome, via Tom's Hardware
The shutdown reportedly occurred abruptly, just before the planned launch of a new consumer SSD that had already been distributed to reviewers. Consumer SSD space has been recording a lot of uncertainty recently, as larger brands have been able to launch consumer SSDs while enjoying profits from the enterprise buildout, and AI expansion is requiring massive storage units. These larger brands can distill some of their products into consumer-focused sections without much impact on margins, as the enterprise is willing to pay top Dollar for SSDs. Sadly, Solidgm has not chosen that path and is instead going all-in on the enterprise segment. Sadly, fewer SSD makers in the consumer space means less competition, so we hope that this trend doesn't continue.
31 Comments on Solidigm Stops Consumer SSD Business, Operations Ended Last Year
Kioxia will have inherited Toshiba and OCZ/Indilinx controllers, but seem to have let most of it fall by the wayside.
SK Hynix purchased Link-a-media (LAMD) and used it but am not aware of them carrying it on.
In theory, they both have the capability to do it all in house.
As for the others;
Seagate had Sandforce and LSI at some point and then just never bothered with them - in theory having all the expertise in house except for NAND fab production itself (but definitely the R&D capability).
It's kind of ironic that the of the original NAND flash controller manufacturers (who also did more than just SATA/NVM SSD drives, e.g. USB flash, etc.), Phison and SM seemed to survive as independents - ironically the two that never chased high performance back when the commercial SSD explosion circa-2010 kicked in.
Technically JMicron were also Toshiba linked but seemed to remain independent - they since spun the SSD controllers off to MaxioTech.
Their roadmap from earlier this year, has PCIe 5.0 controllers on it though.
www.techpowerup.com/323575/realtek-to-join-the-pcie-5-0-nvme-ssd-controller-race
Also to note, here in the UK, Solidigm had good distribution setup, it wasn't difficult to aquire one of their NVMe's from the well known retailers here, I guess with more or less having being already setup prior under Intel. SK Hynix on the other hand, I can only see them on sale via Amazon UK. SK Hynix seem an absolute shit show, and their SSD tool looks like something out the 1990s.
More than that, I wish things were just standardized, and a generic software would work for all features on all drives.
Like printers or scanners that work fine with just plain drivers, versus the full install including a huge ugly badly-designed partially-broken not-forward-OS-compatible piece of software.
But Realtek don't have any presence in terms of NAND or DRAM.