Western Digital Acquires SSD Company

Western Digital announced this morning that they were acquiring SiliconSystems, a flash storage company, in an effort to expand their offerings into the SSD realm. The acquisition cost $65 million and is effective immediately.

SiliconSystems will be in charge of making solid state drives for WD. However, we don't know of any specific products in line to make a debut as of yet. Even so, SiliconSystems' current offerings are probably a good indicator of where Western Digital will be headed: 2.5-inch SDDs and drives the size of memory cards.

The hope here is to boost the popularity of SSDs by rebranding them under a more well-known company. This should also knock down the price tag for the often pricey drives. We'll just have to wait and see how this turns out, but it seems most hard drive companies are jumping on the SSD bandwagon, even if they were reluctant at first. Seagate is expected to release their first SSD sometime this year.