Lite-On IT Gets in the SSD Game, Starts in Third Quarter

It looks like more and more makers of storage units are entering the solid state drive market now that SSDs are getting cheaper and overall better than ever, with Lite-On IT being among the latest to take such a stance.

Solid state drives did start out as fairly promising projects, but it was only after the TRIM command, which maintains performance over time, appeared that they took off.

Even then they did not progress too quickly, because their storage capacities were very low compared to those of hard disk drives.

What's more, they were, and still are, fairly expensive compared to the latter, even though their performance superiority is unmistakable.

In fact, with the newest generations of controller chips, like those from SandForce, they even have what it takes to leverage the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface.

That said, it appears that Lite-On IT is getting ready to join in on the fun of it all, starting in the third quarter of the ongoing year (2011).

At present, it is a maker of optical disk drives, but it shouldn't be too hard for it to steadily build an SSD section, especially now that prices of NAND memory are decreasing, what with smaller and, thus, more productive manufacturing processes being used.

For starters, it will begin sending 32 GB to 64 GB models to notebook PCs, retail markets and server/industrial PC makers. They will utilize the HyperDuo technology from Marvell.

The report also revealed that Lite-On expects the retail, server and industrial PC markets to account for just 20-30% of its yearly SSD revenues, meaning that the outfit has high hopes for the notebook PC industry (70-80% of SSD business).

What remains is to see the actual products cropping up and how they compare with all those that have already been released or previewed.