Western Digital Announces Major Investment In Skyera

Western Digital has been producing hard drives for a number of years and is one of the most popular companies in the market. As the hard drive market declines, the SSD market is growing. Hard drives use spinning magnetic platters to store large quantities of data, but have slower data access speeds.

On the other hand, the SSD uses very fast flash storage allowing for incredibly quick access speeds, but the typical SSD has low storage capacity. SSDs also tend to be very expensive. Western Digital has announced that it has made a significant investment in a solid-state storage company called Skyera.

Western Digital has announced that it has participated in Skyera's recently announced Series B round of financing. Western Digital Capital co-invested in the $51 million round of funding as an extension of the strategic relationship between the two companies. Western Digital had previously invested money with Skyera as an initial outside investor.

Skyera CEO Radoslav Danilak says that the new round of investment backed by Western Digital will help the company to expand its business across marketing, sales, and engineering. Skyera produces a line of enterprise solid-state storage systems in the skyHawk series. The company's solid-state storage systems have what Western Digital calls an industry breakthrough price point of under three dollars per gigabyte. The low price of the systems allows the latest generation 19/20nm solid-state technology to be used as a direct replacement for traditional enterprise hard drive systems.

[via WDC]