FORTASA BLOG

Can't Source the SSDs Anymore

The Industrial Flash Memory Market landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. The major suppliers of Industrial Grade Flash cards and SSDs have quietly abandoned the market and the customer base. First, about 18 months ago, Western Digital (WD) announced an abrupt end of life to their Industrial storage products. Then, about a year ago, WD had acquired STEC, a de-facto leader in the Industrial SSD space. SMART Modular's SSD division was sold to SanDisk and Anobit, an innovative SSD provider was snapped up by Apple, and finally just a few weeks ago OCZ was bought out by Toshiba in a bankruptcy proceeding.

Why did this happen, and more importantly where does a customer find a long term reliable supplier for their product needs.

Well, the answer is quite simple, Industrial Applications mandate tremendous amount of technical and logistical support, while the sales volume is not significant enough to compensate the required additional overhead.

As an example, Fortasa offers over 3000 line items, multiple product categories (Flash cards, SSDs, Modules, Disk Chips, etc.), multiple bus interfaces (PATA, SATA, USB, eMMC), wide density ranges (128MB to 64GB of storage), SLC or MLC-NAND, temperature options (Standard or Industrial), connector choices, connector locations, etc. Given all these permutations, the part count is in the thousands. What's even worse is typically each part number is only designed-in and purchased by a single customer. So all the effort and cost of designing, testing and qualifying a point product is not even shared between multiple customers. And the more customers you have, the more resources and money you spend supporting their needs.

So eventually, as the companies reach a certain volume and business level, they implode under their unmanageable cost of products and service. So the logical exit strategy out of this business predicament is to consolidate by merger, or abandon the Industrial products or both.

Unlike our bigger competitors, Fortasa Memory Systems, Inc. is nimble enough to be able to deliver custom product and service, yet remain profitable and prosperous. A good analogy is the dawn of the Ice age where the bigger animals, like dinosaurs, have perished, unable to cope with the changing environment, yet smaller ones have adjusted, survived and prospered.

We have been converting many customers bitten by the unforeseen supply disruptions of the above mentioned companies and having to scramble to find alternate sources for critical storage systems that the incumbent suppliers were not willing to manufacture anymore.

Please contact Fortasa for any substitute Solid State Storage products that are no longer manufactured by your incumbent suppliers.