Why is it so easy to manufacture SSD drive?

Right now, the only companies who can make hard disk are Seagate, Hitachi, WD, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Samsung. They need to make a huge investment to manufacture a hard disk.

In SSD however, I start to see more and more 'unknown/non-brand' companies are able to manufacture SSD. Day by day, there are more manufacturers coming in to join to manufacture SSD. Most of them are small-medium private companies (non enterprise).

Is it so easy to build SSD or what? What about their reliability?

 

Often those small "unknown" companies are just rebranding the products from the big ones. Sometimes they do fiddle with the firmware, along with the rebranding.

 

well, an SSD has two main parts - the controller, and the chips. for both, there are only about three or four OEM manufacturers, everybody else just buys their stuff and puts it in a case with a new logo on it.

 

I wouldnt call it easy to make. It will take quite a bit of designing to make an SSD work. In terms of relating harddrive and SSD manufacturing, it is much easier to manufacture a SSD than a harddrive, and it is cheaper to manufacture SSD's than harddrives.

As others have mentioned, most of the noname brands you have never heard of are purely rebranding other SSD's

The big guys who make SSD's are Hitachi/Intel, M-TRON, Samsung, memoright, and some others I cant think of at the moment

K-TRON

 

you also have corsair and Super Talent which just released a 500gb ssd being is far too expensive:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/08/super-talent-ships-1-500-2-5-inch-masterdrive-rx-512gb-ssd/

 

The article states the Super Talent is a rebranded Toshiba. The Corsair I don't know.

 

The reason for the proliferation of manufacturers is not that it is easy, but that it's a technology that is close to the border of becoming mainstream (though not quite there yet). There is enormous potential for profit here; it's one of the few places where small companies can become large.

The reason so few companies are in the hard drive business and all of them are big are economies of scale. WD, Seagate, etc. already have all of the infrastructure in place for large scale production, they have the leading experts in the field working for them and they have relationships with wholesale buyers. If a business decides that it wants in on the hard drive market, it will have to make huge investments to match them -- and in the end, its product is extremely unlikely to be different from theirs so the return on investment will not be enough to justify its costs. Basically, all of the players are already at the table and wedging yourself in is neither pleasant nor productive.

SSDs are different in that the market has not yet transitioned to an oligopoly and the products vary immensely in quality. Nobody has vast manufacturing facilities that have been making SSDs for the past half decade. Nobody has made an SSD that would satisfy most consumers in size, price and speed so the experts are still learning. There are only a few (Samsung) who have relationships with wholesale buyers and if you make something much better, there are still plenty of them to be won. There is a lot of room to grow -- all that is necessary is seed money.

 

SSDs may not be easy, but I'd imagine it'd be far easier to buy flash and controller chips and slapping them on a board than to manufacture or buy platters and put them together to make a hard drive. The construction tolerance for hard drives is probably much tighter because they are highly precise mechanical devices. This pretty much guarantees a prohibitively high cost of entry.

 

Pretty sure Corsair just rebrands Samsung drives.

SSD market is also a bit easier to enter since the normal HDD makers aren't really there (WD/Seagate/Hitachi) so there is room for someone to really jump in and make some sales/market share. Samsung is really the only HDD maker that sells HDD's and SSD's (I haven't seen a Hitachi SSD available for sale in retail?).

As mentioned though, SSD's are manufactured by only a handful of companies and then rebranded by other companies.

 

The HD makers sorta missed the boat(well... late to the party anyway)... interested in seeing what they are going to come out with... should be some good fun soon.

WD vs Intel... that's going to be good.

 

Excellent answer, Althernai.

 

This may be true, but you are missing one thing.
The Intel SSD is successful because of design. Hitachi manufactures the PCB for them. Look it up. All of their SSD's are jointly made between Intel and Hitachi.

Certain companies do more than just harddrive.

Seagate and AMD are teaming to come up with a new interface, I doubt it will be very fruitful. Seagate also makes a lot of microcontrollers and interface devices.

Western Digital may go under in advent of the death of harddrives, because they only make harddrives. They used to manufacture graphics cards, memory devices and harddrive controller cards back in the 1980's.

Hitachi manufactures tons of things from Cranes, construction equipment, harddrives, joint venture in SSD's with Intel, all sorts of microcontrollers, capacitors, etc. They will probably not be effected much at all if mechanical drives were wiped out.

Samsung manufactures basically everything under the sun, from SSD's, camera's, cars, supertankers, memory, etc. They have a ton of resources since they are the largest enterprise in all of Korea.

Toshiba manufactures most of their products directly with Samsung. They combined make Toshiba Samsung Storage Technologies. They are the manufacturers of every type of storage solution. They manufacture memory for most of the memory business.

Fujistu will they were bought out by WD, but they used to make sweet enterprise harddrives, server cases, and a few small things

K-TRON

 

The main reasons there aren't many HDD makers is that the profit margin is very small and that the initial investment cost is huge.

HDD manufacturers have one of the smallest profit margins in the computer hardware industry, relative to the cost of the product. Most disk drives sold have a profit measured in cents per drive sold, so the company is highly dependent on large quantities of drives sold.

HDD manufacturing also requires large, expensive facilities, which only industry giants can really afford. Combined with the small profit margins, it would take a potential hard drive startup a long time to become profitable, as initial quantities sold would be very small, and initial production costs before optimization would be very high.

That's also why you see a lot of consolidation going on in the HDD industry (ie: Seagate acquiring Maxtor, WD acquiring Fujitsu, etc).

 

If you notice, almost all of these small SSD manufacturers are prominent forces in the consumer RAM field. OCZ, G.Skill, Patriot, Crucial, Corsair, Kingston, SuperTalent, etc. While it's likely all or most of them are using flash memory chips from Samsung, they already have a leg up on companies like Seagate and Western Digital because all they need to do is find a drive controller manufacturer. If you really oversimplify SSDs, they're repackaged RAM with a different PCB layout, controller, and casing. It's a very easy transition for these companies that already prolifically push out RAM to jump into the SSD market since they already have 95% of the manufacturing infrastructure in place.

 

Western Digital bought one of the SSD makers a couple weeks ago. We'll see what happens. But yeah the Big 3 in hard drives all had different responses

WD: Let's sit on our hands until one company needs capital. Then we buy em and call the products our own
Hitachi: Let's get into bed with Intel and build stuff for them. Build experience.
Seagate: Sue 'em out of existence. (failed)

 

Reading white papers on SiliconSystems' (Company WD bought out) products, they definitely have their **** together so to speak. For example, their SiliconDrive III SATA series 120GB drive has operating temperatures of -44C to 83C and a 20 year lifespan @ 1650 GB/day usage. That's crazy.

 

I remember when WD (I believe?) stated that SSD wouldn't pick up and that was why it wasn't willing to invest into that technology like last year lol.

 

Sure its tough but no mention of speeds anywhere? 1650GB a day roughly equates to 19 megabytes per second... not astounding by any measure.

Looks like a niche product for military and government types. Not exactly what is needed to keep WD afloat.

And this is just a whitepaper... . That said, we can probably expect something, just not quite intel's shocker from this

 

It doesn't mean that 1650GB/day is the max speed it can handle. Perhaps that number is some estimate of average useage, not max speed.

 

*sigh*

GB per day is what enterprise class clients want to know, longevity, etc. Military, medical, etc. They advertise 100 MB/s reads and 90 MB/s writes, which is about what Mtron drives get. I'm sure they have the ability to re-tweak their controller for consumer friendly performance.

 

You can't call companies like Corsair/OCZ/SuperTalent merely rebranding other drives.

REBRANDING is like Kingston taking Intel drives and calling them Kingston drives.

The companies like Corsair/OCZ/SuperTalent has their customized firmware at the least.

 

Those unknown or unpopular manufacturers of HDDs usually don't stray far from the best manufacturers in terms of electronic technology in order to get a selling advantage so the only difference with them is only through marketing strategies and less on the technology being integrated..