Sandisk announced today that it has acquired SMART Storage Systems. This company manufacturers enterprise solid state disks and related technology. The technology the company develops makes it possible to use the cheaper MLC NAND in enterprise environments. Traditionally enterprise SSDs are usually made up of the expensive SLC NAND.
Using a technology called FlashGuard, SMART claims to have extended the endurance of MLC from 1 full capacity write a day to 50 ful capacity write per day. This means that a drive can be written up to its full capacity 50 times a day without a decrease in endurance.
Besides FlashGuard, the company also has DataGuard and EverGuard technology in their portfolio, which respectively protect against data corruption during normal usage and data corruption due to an unexpected loss of power.
According to the press release Sandisk paid $307 million in cash and also additional equity-related incentives. With the acquisition Sandisk hopes to strenghten its position in the enterprise SSD market by benefiting from SMART's R&D and current customer base. The big winner of the deal is likely Silver Lake, an investment company that invested in SMART Storage since 2011. There's more consolidation in the enterprise SSD market, nearly a week ago Western Digital acquired sTec.
Recently we reviewed a SMART Optimus SSD and were impressed by its performance.
