flash-storage
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Lexar Beat the Company That Invented the SD Card to the First 1TB SD Card
A 1996 spin-off that Micron owned and then let go, Lexar was bought for its name in 2017 - and has since shipped some of the fastest cards photographers and gamers can buy.
Nimbus Data
Nimbus Data is a privately held, largely self-funded American flash storage company founded in 2003 by Thomas Isakovich. It designs all-flash arrays and solid state drives - most famously the ExaDrive DC100, the 100-terabyte SSD it introduced in 2018 that remained the world's largest for years. Rather than chase venture money, the company built a profitable business selling high-capacity, power-efficient storage to enterprises, cloud providers, and AI and edge workloads, backed by its HALO/AFX software and a flat-rate support model.
ScaleFlux
ScaleFlux designs computational storage drives and CXL memory devices that push compute into the storage layer itself. Founded in 2014 by chip and flash veterans Hao Zhong, Tong Zhang and Yang Liu, the Milpitas company sells NVMe SSDs whose on-drive ASICs handle compression, encryption and data services that used to burn host CPU cycles - giving enterprises more usable capacity, longer flash endurance, and faster database and AI workloads.