Solidigm pulls out of consumer SSD market with discontinuation of drives – Storage company shut down consumer division over a year ago

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).

In addition to Solidigm’s two consumer SSDs being canned, the storage manufacturer’s website also no longer lists consumer drives anywhere on the front page; even the products drop-down menu makes no mention of 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.”

Some vestiges of Solidigm’s consumer drives still persist, however. At the bottom of the front page, “QLC SSD” is a suggested search term and brings up an article about QLC NVMe SSDs, which Solidigm no longer produces.

The storage company was formed out of Intel’s SSD business back in 2021, when South Korean memory firm Sk Hynix bought the group for $9 billion. The deal included employees, Intel’s storage technology and IP, and wafer production. The transfer of employees and assets to Sk Hynix won’t even be fully completed until March, by which time 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 discontinuation of the P44 Pro and P41 Plus come over a year after Solidigm dissolved its consumer SSD division, which Tom’s Hardware has learned from a person familiar with the matter. 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. We’ve contacted Solidigm for comment but haven’t heard back yet.

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 in spite of 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).