Solidigm finalizes consumer SSD market exit with discontinuation of drives – Storage company shut down consumer division over a year ago [Updated]

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Chasing the data center instead of consumers.

2TB Solidigm P41 Plus SSD
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Solidigm has officially discontinued its P44 Pro and P41 Plus SSDs, the only consumer SSDs the company has ever launched and likely ever will (via ITHome), finalizing its exit from the consumer SSD business.

In addition to Solidigm’s two consumer SSDs being canned, the storage manufacturer’s website no longer lists consumer drives anywhere on the front page; even the products drop-down menu does not mention consumer storage. Instead, nearly the entire website is now dedicated to Solidigm’s data center SSD business, and on Google search, the website is listed as “Solidigm Enterprise SSDs.”

"Last year Solidigm notified our consumer SSD customers that the Solidigm P41 Plus and P44 Pro SSDs would be our final products and for future consumer products they should move to the SK hynix client roadmap with our parent company," a Solidigm representative told us. "Solidigm is focusing our efforts on data center SSDs where we've become the leader in high-capacity eSSDs for AI deployments with the broadest product portfolio for all stages in the AI data pipeline and general-purpose compute workloads."

The storage company was formed from Intel’s SSD business in 2021 when South Korean memory firm Sk Hynix bought the group for $9 billion. The deal included employees, Intel’s storage technology, IP, and wafer production. The transfer of employees and assets to Sk Hynix won’t be fully completed until March when Solidigm’s consumer SSDs will have been discontinued for months.

The Intel 660p and 670p, which Solidigm has continued to manufacture since the 2021 acquisition, are also caught in the crossfire and will seemingly be discontinued in October, according to Solidigm’s website.

The P44 Pro and P41 Plus discontinuation comes over a year after Solidigm dissolved its consumer SSD division. Tom’s Hardware learned from a person familiar with the matter that when Solidigm laid off a “modest” amount of its employees in October 2023, it primarily impacted those working on consumer drives, at least according to our source.

The shutdown was apparently sudden and unexpected, happening just before Solidigm’s consumer storage group was about to launch a brand-new SSD that had already been shipped to some reviewers. This was despite the P44 Pro and P41 Plus receiving positive reviews, partially thanks to Solidigm putting in extra effort with things like its Synergy 2.0 driver and toolkit when virtually every other SSD manufacturer relies on Microsoft’s standard SSD drivers.

However, 2023 wasn’t a good time to sell consumer-grade SSDs due to an oversupply that sent prices crashing down. The P41 Plus even sold for as little as $34 in late 2023, right around the time the consumer division was dissolved. While that’s a great deal for buyers, it’s awful for companies like Solidigm. In the first quarter of 2022, Samsung’s profits were down 95% compared to the previous year.

Although its consumer drives are no more, Solidigm has continued its work on data center-grade SSDs, specifically in the niche of AI. Just in November, it launched a 122TB drive with endurance of over 134 petabytes (PB).

Edit 1/02/2024 12:15 am PT: Added Soligidm comment.  

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Matthew Connatser
Matthew Connatser

Matthew Connatser is a freelancing writer for Tom's Hardware US. He writes articles about CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and computers in general.

25 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Jame5
    Why sell consumer SSDs at a loss when you can sell DC SSDs at massive profit margins?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Jame5 said:
    Why sell consumer SSDs at a loss when you can sell DC SSDs at massive profit margins?
    Of course, you don't want to sell them at a loss. That's obviously a deal-breaker, but the companies in consumer market aren't generally taking a loss on them. I think one big advantage is that it lets them bin their NAND, reserving only the highest grade for their datacenter markets. In general, it should give them more return-on-investment, since most of their controllers, firmware, etc. can be shared across both consumer & datacenter product lines.

    2022-2023 was quite an exceptional period, for SSDs in general - not just consumer! I even bought a datacenter Solidigm SSD in mid-2023 for about half what it was selling for, a year later.

    Intel used to be one of my go-to brands, for SSDs. Last year, I even bought a couple SK Hynix consumer drives (P31 Gold). I was looking forward to what the merged entity would produce. This is disappointing.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    bit_user said:
    Of course, you don't want to sell them at a loss. That's obviously a deal-breaker, but the companies in consumer market aren't generally taking a loss on them. I think one big advantage is that it lets them bin their NAND, reserving only the highest grade for their datacenter markets. In general, it should give them more return-on-investment, since most of their controllers, firmware, etc. can be shared across both consumer & datacenter product lines.

    2022-2023 was quite an exceptional period, for SSDs in general - not just consumer! I even bought a datacenter Solidigm SSD in mid-2023 for about half what it was selling for, a year later.

    Intel used to be one of my go-to brands, for SSDs. Last year, I even bought a couple SK Hynix consumer drives (P31 Gold). I was looking forward to what the merged entity would produce. This is disappointing.
    Disappointing but not really all that surprising. When Intel sold off its SSD division and Solidigm was formed, it was always going to be an uphill battle. Intel didn't see a future in the market segment. Could a separate entity do better? Apparently the answer is no.

    RIP, Solidigm. I'm still sad that the promises of 3D XPoint never panned out as well.
    Reply
  • tracker1
    I think it's a shame. The few times I've looked, I hadn't been able to even find Solidigm consumer nvme drives in stock. I've kind of settled on mostly WD Black lately as Samsung has been a little overpriced IMO and the controller firmware issue from last Gen affected me.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    Disappointing but not really all that surprising. When Intel sold off its SSD division and Solidigm was formed, it was always going to be an uphill battle. Intel didn't see a future in the market segment. Could a separate entity do better? Apparently the answer is no.
    Intel needed money and Gelsinger wanted to focus on CPUs, GPUs, and AI. That's different than "not seeing a future".

    Clearly, there are companies having success in the consumer SSD market. Also, Intel didn't only sell off their client SSD business. The same business unit also made their datacenter drives. The only part SK Hynix didn't get was the Optane business. In fact, the Solidigm datacenter drive I bought last year actually arrived with Intel branding, since apparently there was still some older stock in the channel.

    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    RIP, Solidigm.
    They're still around. Just not doing client SSDs, any more.

    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    I'm still sad that the promises of 3D XPoint never panned out as well.
    Yeah, that got wound down before the sale. I assume if there were any buyers to be had for Optane, Intel would've sold it instead of shuttering it. They never turned a profit on it, though. I'd have loved to see the Optane CXL drives they were allegedly working on.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    I hope someone is able to get some more details on the situation. I think I mentioned it in one of the SSD review threads here that I was surprised when I went looking for the software for my P44 Pros when I put my system together and found the drives discontinued. This all seemed to happen under the radar. I think the biggest loss here is the custom driver development (someone over on the TPU forums even has it working on other drives).

    I think given the information in this article it's likely they'd laid off everyone working in the US in 2023. Allyn Malventano who'd worked for Intel and moved over to Solidigm started working for Phison sometime late 23/early 24. He had been one of the people behind the custom driver push which was something Intel hadn't been interested in doing. It doesn't particularly seem like there's going to be a big client push from Phison, but they are hitting datacenter.

    NAND client drives are a low margin business and Solidigm had been acquired for the enterprise business (SK Hynix had no real presence here). Now the real question is what does this mean for the client facing SK Hynix drives. The P44 Pro used the same hardware as the P41 SK Hynix drive and there is a P51 though it still hasn't been released to market. SK Hynix also has an OEM client division which is where these drives all originated from. Now there's Klevv (under the same corporate umbrella) who uses SK Hynix NAND/DRAM but multisources controllers. Klevv doesn't seem like it will be going anywhere and I doubt the SK Hynix OEM business will either, but the retail client division it's hard to say.

    I've talked multiple times about the death of 3D XPoint and how bad that was from a technology standpoint. Rather than rehash it though there is something new I thought of while pondering it's death reading this thread. While there is no doubt it was a money sink it might have actually survived if Intel had been getting EUV machines in volume pre-pandemic. I've always assumed part of its death can be attributed to the manufacturing process being driven by Micron who likely used industry standard tools. This meant that while it's nowhere near as complex as a CPU/GPU it would likely have meant a non-insignificant amount of work to spin it up on Intel's own fabs. During a transisition time like DUV to EUV it might have made sense to manufacture it on early EUV nodes since it should have been simple and high yield. It also might have made sense to do the work to produce it on DUV to keep those fabs working while designing a new DUV node with industry standard tools.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    thestryker said:
    it might have actually survived if Intel had been getting EUV machines in volume pre-pandemic. I've always assumed part of its death can be attributed to the manufacturing process being driven by Micron who likely used industry standard tools. This meant that while it's nowhere near as complex as a CPU/GPU it would likely have meant a non-insignificant amount of work to spin it up on Intel's own fabs. During a transisition time like DUV to EUV it might have made sense to manufacture it on early EUV nodes since it should have been simple and high yield.
    Assuming it could continue scaling in 2 dimensions, a key question is whether they could keep scaling the number of layers. If not, then even a bump in the planar density wouldn't be enough for them to keep pace with NAND, in the long run.

    IMO, there are just too many unknowns about the underlying technology and whether it really had the potential to scale much further. I assume they looked at the trajectories of the respective technologies and only saw 3D-Xpoint falling further behind. If it had been only a short-term setback, then I'd have expected they could at least find a buyer. Even now, they should be able to sell their patents and someone else could take it up, if it had legs. It makes zero sense for them to just sit on viable patents, now that they're not in the storage industry at all. That just underscores my feeling that the technology must have appeared unable to compete with 3D NAND, ever.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    Saw someone on the thread over at TPU regarding this news that they'd added the P41 to the Solidigm driver (double checked and they did this back in June) so perhaps there will be further development under SK Hynix branding.
    Reply
  • User of Computers
    Lol. the P44 pro's firmware issues must've done in the consumer division once and for all.
    Reply
  • watzupken
    In my opinion, there are too many SSD brands out there. Many which don't sell that well unless they go aggressive on pricing. So while it is good for consumers, there is very weak business case for companies to justify fighting tooth and nail in this segment.
    Reply