Kioxia reportedly kills off 30-year-old Plextor brand — icon of the optical drive days spins up its last SSD

Anton Shilov
·2 min read
Plextor.
Plextor.

Plextor is one of the legendary names in client PC storage and has been associated with high quality and performance for nearly three decades. But it looks like Kioxia thinks differently, as it has decided to shut down the Plextor brand for SSDs and use the Solid State Storage Technology (SSSTC) trademark instead, according to a report by HKEPC. SSSTC will focus solely on drives for enterprise, datacenter, and industrial applications.

The GoPlextor.com website has already been shutdown, and Plextor.com leads to SSSTC.com — which only lists products for enterprise, datacenter, and industrial applications and no longer lists consumer SSDs.

SSSTC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Kioxia, which makes 3D NAND memory and various NAND flash-based products, including SSDs and memory cards. Kioxia obtained SSSTC from Lite-On, which decided to get rid of its solid-state storage business in 2019. It sold this unit for $165 million to Toshiba Memory, which was renamed Kioxia later that year. Plextor used to make some of the best SSDs.

The main values of Lite-On's SSD unit were its capable R&D team, the brand's reputation for reliability and high performance among PC enthusiasts, and its well-established business relations with channel and OEM clients.

Meanwhile, success of Plextor's SSDs was largely driven by the success of Marvell's SSD controllers and Plextor's ability to design competitive firmware. But Marvell was late to market with PCIe Gen4 and PCIe Gen5 controllers as its developers fled to InnoGrit. Unlike its rivals, Plextor never adopted Phison's platforms, but started relying on controllers from InnoGrit, Marvell, and Silicon Motion, which meant that the company had to disperse its resources and design three different branches of firmware — not a particularly good way of using limited resources. As a consequence, the value of the Plextor brand dropped among enthusiasts, and Kioxia has decided to kill it off instead of reviving it.

In fact, from now on, Kioxia's SSSTC will no longer offer client SSDs at all, and will instead focus on enterprise, datacenter, and industrial drives. Kioxia itself will, of course, continue to provide SSDs for client applications, but the company is somewhat behind its rivals: it still does not have a single drive with a PCIe 5.0 interface, while many of its rivals have already launched two generations.

SSSTC will continue to offer RMA services to current owners of Plextor drives, but don't expect new Plextor-branded products to emerge in the future. Something similar happened to the OCZ brand, which was also abandoned by Toshiba (the ancestor of Kioxia) in favor of its own brand SSDs.

Plextor will be missed since the brand has been known for its excellent optical disk drivers and SSDs for over 30 years.