CENTER OF INNOVATION
Orange County now has at least four companies developing flash-memory drives as a higher-performing, higher-priced substitute for standard hard-disk drives.
That’s not counting flash-memory specialists such as Kingston Technology of Fountain Valley, which makes memory-boosting cards and USB flash drives but have not announced plans for units that replace hard drives.
Toshiba, which has its Toshiba America Information Systems headquarters in Irvine, announced Dec. 10 that will begin manufacturing flash-based solid-state drives for laptops early next year. (Admittedly, the technological heavy-lifting is in labs in Japan.)
STEC of Santa Ana on Dec. 4 unveiled a line of 32-gigabyte to 512-gigabyte flash-memory drives that it will sell to computer manufacturers for much less than similar products now on the market. (For an analysis of what to expect from these drives, see “STEC’s laptop innovation has flash, but it’s no Ferrari.”)
SiliconSystems of Aliso Viejo makes solid-state drives for high-end military and business customers, as does Netlist of Irvine.
Competitors outside Orange County include:
- SanDisk of Milpitas, which is making 1.8 and 2.5-inch solid-state drives.
- Samsung, based in Seoul, Korea, which said last month that it had started producing sample 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch solid-state drives. It did not say when the drives would go on sale.
This post includes information from The New York Times.
What about Transcend in Irvine.
Thanks for mentioning Transcend, which does make solid-state drives among its other memory products. Transcend Information Inc., based in Taiwan, has U.S. operations in Orange and in Linthicum Heights, Md.