SanDisk co-founder Eli Harari developed the Floating Gate
EEPROM which proved the practicality, reliability and endurance of semiconductor-based data storage.[4]
In 1991, SanDisk produced the first flash-based
solid-state drive (SSD) in a 2.5-inch
hard disk drive form factor for
IBM with a 20 MB capacity priced at about $1,000.[5]
In 1992, SanDisk introduced FlashDisk, a series of memory cards made for the
PCMCIA or PC card form factor, so they could be inserted into the expansion slots of many laptops and handheld PCs of the time. Unlike other similar products at the time, FlashDisks did not require a battery to store their contents. SanDisk discontinued their production in 2002, and the highest capacity model had 8 gigabytes of capacity.[3]
On May 10, 2000, the
Toshiba Corporation of Japan and the SanDisk Corporation said that they would jointly form a new semiconductor company to produce advanced flash memory, primarily for
digital cameras.[6]
In 2005 SanDisk entered the
digital audio player market with the release of its first flash-based MP3 player, the
SanDisk Sansa e100.[7] As soon as 2006, they became the second largest maker of digital audio players in the United States behind
Apple.[8]
Acquisitions and growth
In October 2005, SanDisk acquired Matrix Semiconductor.[9]
In June 2012, SanDisk acquired
Schooner Information Technology, developer of the flash-optimized database software SchoonerSQL and caching software Membrain.[12]
In July 2013, SanDisk acquired SMART Storage Systems, a producer of SSDs for the enterprise market, for US$307 million.[13]
In June 2014, SanDisk acquired
Fusion-io, a producer of flash memory for enterprise
data centers, for $1.1 billion.[14]
On January 8, 2015, NexGen Storage, which had been acquired by Fusion-io, was spun out to become an independent company once again.[17]
In January 2016, Pivot3 (based in
Austin, Texas) acquired NexGen Storage.[18]
SanDisk was acquired by hard disk drive manufacturer
Western Digital on May 12, 2016, for US$19 billion.[19][20]
In 2019
Sanjay Mehrotra received a lifetime achievement award at a trade show.[21]
^"Santa Clara Valley Chapter Meeting: 'Future Directions for Semiconductor Non-Volatile Memory". Santa Clara University: IEEE Electron Devices Society. January 16, 1990.