Western Digital is set to establish an R&D center in Hsinchu, Taiwan, focusing on solid state drives (SSD) and will recruit about 50 technicians from Taiwan, according to the company.

Western Digital currently has a SSD R&D center at its headquarters in the US with about 200-250 technicians and the R&D center in Taiwan will be its first overseas R&D base.

Western Digital plans to finish recruiting for the Taiwan R&D center in 12-18 months and in addition to the company's own SSD business, the R&D center in Taiwan will also handle SSD business for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) with the related SSD products to appear in the first quarter of 2012.

The company also pointed out that pricing is still the biggest threshold for SSDs to enter the consumer market despite smartphones, tablet PCs and ultrabooks all gradually helping SSDs to penetrate into the consumer market. Since SSDs currently still have and about 10-fold price gap compared to traditional hard drives, Western Digital believes it is still not an appropriate time for SSDs to fully enter into the consumer market and therefore will focus its R&D on enterprise applications. 

Source:digitimes