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.
