Formerly | SunDisk |
---|---|
Company type | Brand |
Industry | Storage devices |
Founded | 1988 |
Founders | Eli Harari Sanjay Mehrotra Jack Yuan |
Headquarters | , |
Products | |
Number of employees | 8,790 |
Parent | Western Digital |
Website | www |
SanDisk (until 1995 SunDisk) is an American multinational computer technology corporation for flash memory products, including memory cards and readers, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and digital audio players, manufactured and marketed by Western Digital. The original company, SanDisk Corporation was acquired by Western Digital in 2016.
As of March 2019, [update] Western Digital was the fourth-largest manufacturer of flash memory having declined from third-largest in 2014. [1]
SanDisk (originally Sundisk) was founded in 1988 by Eli Harari, Sanjay Mehrotra, and Jack Yuan. [2] In 1995, just before its initial public offering, SunDisk changed its name to SanDisk, to avoid confusion with Sun Microsystems, a prominent computer manufacturer at the time. [3]
SanDisk co-founder Eli Harari developed the Floating Gate EEPROM which proved the practicality, reliability and endurance of semiconductor-based data storage. [4]
In 1991, SanDisk produced the first flash-based solid-state drive (SSD) in a 2.5-inch hard disk drive form factor for IBM with a 20 MB capacity priced at about $1,000. [5]
In 1992, SanDisk introduced FlashDisk, a series of memory cards made for the PCMCIA or PC card form factor, so they could be inserted into the expansion slots of many laptops and handheld PCs of the time. Unlike other similar products at the time, FlashDisks did not require a battery to store their contents. SanDisk discontinued their production in 2002, and the highest capacity model had 8 gigabytes of capacity. [3]
On May 10, 2000, the Toshiba Corporation of Japan and the SanDisk Corporation said that they would jointly form a new semiconductor company to produce advanced flash memory, primarily for digital cameras. [6]
In 2005 SanDisk entered the digital audio player market with the release of its first flash-based MP3 player, the SanDisk Sansa e100. [7] As soon as 2006, they became the second largest maker of digital audio players in the United States behind Apple. [8]
In 2012, the Enough Project ranked SanDisk the third highest of 24 consumer electronics companies on "progress on conflict minerals". [15]
In 2014, SanDisk co-founder Harari won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama for his innovations and contributions to flash memory storage. [16]
On January 8, 2015, NexGen Storage, which had been acquired by Fusion-io, was spun out to become an independent company once again. [17] In January 2016, Pivot3 (based in Austin, Texas) acquired NexGen Storage. [18] SanDisk was acquired by hard disk drive manufacturer Western Digital on May 12, 2016, for US$19 billion. [19] [20]
In 2019 Sanjay Mehrotra received a lifetime achievement award at a trade show. [21]
Computer data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers.
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk, is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box.
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use the same cell design, consisting of floating gate MOSFETs. They differ at the circuit level depending on whether the state of the bit line or word lines is pulled high or low: in NAND flash, the relationship between the bit line and the word lines resembles a NAND gate; in NOR flash, it resembles a NOR gate.
Western Digital Corporation is an American computer drive manufacturer and data storage company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including data storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
A flash drive is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and usually weighs less than 30 g (1 oz). Since first offered for sale in late 2000, the storage capacities of USB drives range from 8 to 256 gigabytes (GB), 512 GB and 1 terabyte (TB). As of 2023, 2 TB flash drives were the largest currently in production. Some allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles, depending on the exact type of memory chip used, and are thought to physically last between 10 and 100 years under normal circumstances.
Micron Technology, Inc. is an American producer of computer memory and computer data storage including dynamic random-access memory, flash memory, and USB flash drives. It is headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Its consumer products, including the Ballistix line of memory modules, are marketed under the Crucial brand. Micron and Intel together created IM Flash Technologies, which produced NAND flash memory. It owned Lexar between 2006 and 2017.
Quantum Corporation is a data storage, management, and protection company that provides technology to store, manage, archive, and protect video and unstructured data throughout the data life cycle. Their products are used by enterprises, media and entertainment companies, government agencies, big data companies, and life science organizations. Quantum is headquartered in San Jose, California and has offices around the world, supporting customers globally in addition to working with a network of distributors, VARs, DMRs, OEMs and other suppliers.
Lite-On is a Taiwanese company that primarily manufactures consumer electronics, including LEDs, semiconductors, computer chassis, monitors, motherboards, optical disc drives, and other electronic components. The Lite-On group also consists of some non-electronic companies like a finance arm and a cultural company.
In computing, a hybrid drive is a logical or physical storage device that combines a faster storage medium such as solid-state drive (SSD) with a higher-capacity hard disk drive (HDD). The intent is adding some of the speed of SSDs to the cost-effective storage capacity of traditional HDDs. The purpose of the SSD in a hybrid drive is to act as a cache for the data stored on the HDD, improving the overall performance by keeping copies of the most frequently used data on the faster SSD drive.
SK hynix Inc. is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory chips. Hynix is the world's second-largest memory chipmaker and the world's sixth-largest semiconductor company. Founded as Hyundai Electronic Industrial Co., Ltd. in 1983 and known as Hyundai Electronics, the company has manufacturing sites in Korea, the United States, mainland China and Taiwan. In 2012, when SK Telecom became its major shareholder, Hynix merged with SK Group.
Kingston Technology Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, sells and supports flash memory products, other computer-related memory products, as well as the HyperX gaming division. Headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, United States, Kingston Technology employs more than 3,000 employees worldwide as of Q1 2016. The company has manufacturing and logistics facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Taiwan, and China.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functions as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is also sometimes called a semiconductor storage device, a solid-state device, or a solid-state disk, even though SSDs lack the physical spinning disks and movable read-write heads used in hard disk drives (HDDs) and floppy disks. SSD also has rich internal parallelism for data processing.
Fusion-io, Inc. was a computer hardware and software systems company based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, that designed and manufactured products using flash memory technology. The Fusion ioMemory was marketed for applications such as databases, virtualization, cloud computing, big data. Their ioDrive product was considered around 2011 to be one of the fastest storage devices on the market.
A hybrid array is a form of hierarchical storage management that combines hard disk drives (HDDs) with solid-state drives (SSDs) for I/O speed improvements.
Texas Memory Systems, Inc. (TMS) was an American corporation that designed and manufactured solid-state disks (SSDs) and digital signal processors (DSPs). TMS was founded in 1978 and that same year introduced their first solid-state drive, followed by their first digital signal processor. In 2000 they introduced the RamSan line of SSDs. Based in Houston, Texas, they supply these two product categories to large enterprise and government organizations.
Nimbus Data is an American computer data storage software and systems company.
Sanjay Mehrotra is an Indian-American business executive and the CEO of Micron Technology. He was a co-founder of SanDisk, and its president and CEO from 2011 until its acquisition by Western Digital in 2016.
Virtium Solid State Storage and Memory is a privately held American company that manufactures semiconductor memory and solid-state disk (SSD) products for data storage in industrial/machine-to-machine designs, embedded systems, including small-footprint designs, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The company's primary markets of focus include defense, industrial systems, network communications, and transportation. The name Virtium is derived from the word virtue.
Eliyahou Harari is an Israeli-American business executive best known for being the co-founder of SanDisk along with Sanjay Mehrotra.
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