Rumor: Kioxia is discontinuing 30-year-old SSD and optical drive manufacturer Plextor

Kioxia is reportedly discontinuing the more than thirty-year-old Plextor brand. The latter was an independent brand until 2010 that, among other things, designed optical drives. It then made SSDs as part of Philips & Lite-On and, since 2020, Kioxia.

Since the beginning of this year, the Plextor site has referred to the Solid State Storage Technology site, discovered the Chinese Hkepc. Ssstc is a subsidiary of Kioxia, formerly Toshiba Memory, which also makes SSDs, although unlike Plextor’s products, they are only intended for the business market. According to Hkepc, Ssstc will handle the warranties of the already released SSDs of the defunct brand.

Founded in 1985, Plextor has developed a wide range of products including flash memory, hard drives, floppy disk drives, digital video recorders and CD-DVD burners. The company was sold to the joint venture Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions Corporation in 2010. In 2019, Kioxia took over Lite-On’s SSD division for 149 million euros, giving it access to the Ssstc brand and Plextor’s SSD division, among other things. The last SSD released under the latter name was the 2021 M10P.

The 2021 M10P SSD, believed to be the last product released under the Plextor name