Well-known media and storage unit manufacturer Plextor – SSD is closing its doors

Parent company Kioxia has decided to retire the Plextor brand for its solid-state drive (SSD) modules. Instead, it will start selling these products under the SSSTC (Solid State Storage Technology Corporation) brand in the future. This particular move by Kioxia comes after acquiring Plextor and the entire SSD business of its then parent company Lite-On in 2019. Since then, Plextor has struggled to keep up with new storage technologies. With the availability of new PCIe Gen. 4 and PCIe Gen. Plextor.5 failed to take advantage of the new next-generation solid-state drive platforms from Phison and InnoGrit and preferred to continue using Marvell controllers, but it was lagging behind the competition.

Now, SSSTC and Kioxia will strictly focus on the SSD market for enterprise, data centers and industrial applications rather than the consumer market. Plextor is already redirecting visitors to SSSTC.com, and no longer lists disks for PCs/clients. Existing Plextor SSD owners will still receive warranty support and RMA services, but new Plextor-branded storage will not be released.

In its 30-year history, Plextor has primarily associated its name with high-quality, durable optical CD/DVD players/writers, and later with high-performance SSD drives. However, as happened with OCZ after its acquisition by Toshiba, the Plextor name will now go into the closet of history. But as has been proven countless times in the rapidly evolving technology industry, the survival of companies is directly linked to their ability to adopt cutting-edge new technologies.