Big Disk-Drive Makers Look at SSD Technology

Some big names have been sniffing around at Aliso Viejo’s SiliconSystems Inc., a privately held maker of flash memory drives for industrial uses. Disk drive makers Scotts Valley-based Seagate Technology LLC and Lake Forest’s Western Digital Corp. have been arranging chats with Chief Executive Michael Hajeck for some time now.

The big guys are looking to make sense of the market for solid state drives — drives made of non-moving flash memory chips — that are quickly replacing hard drives in high-end data storage networks, notebook computers and other industry-specific devices that can’t break down.

Solid state drives made of flash memory are more durable, save power and are faster at some tasks than traditional disk drives.

Makers of electronics for data storage networks, including Costa Mesa’s Emulex Corp., Aliso Viejo’s QLogic Corp. and Milpitas’ LSI Corp. are also looking into solid state drives.

“A week doesn’t go by that we aren’t contacted by someone in the storage industry,” Hajeck said. “They are in the early stages of exploration and understanding who the players are in this market, how it will affect them, what’s real, what’s hype and when they’ll need to get in.”

Hajeck insists that his young company isn’t for sale.

Networking gear makers Brocade Communications Systems Inc. of San Jose and NetApp Inc. of Sunnyvale are also said to be interested, according to Hajeck.

All the buzz “increases the size of the pie,” for a time when he might make a move, he said.

Potential suitors might not only be after SiliconSystems’ flash drives, according to Krishna Chander, a storage analyst at El Segundo-based market tracker iSuppli Corp. They may have set their sights on its controllers-interface chips that allow the drive to communicate with the brains of a device, he said.

“The hard drive companies understand the interface between a microprocessor in a PC and…