The 10 Coolest Storage Component Vendors: The 2025 Storage 100

As part of CRN’s 2025 Storage 100, here are 10 vendors storage component vendors taking their offerings to new heights.

The features, capabilities and services offered by storage systems and by technologies in the data recovery, observability and resiliency areas are for the most part designed and built using software that typically can work with industry-standard hardware or run on virtual or cloud environments.

Even so, that should not be interpreted as downgrading the value of the underlying hardware whether it is on a desk, in a data closet or data center, or in a hyperscaler cloud. Those servers, PCs, storage systems or other devices need to provide the required levels of performance and resiliency. And that means adding solid, well-designed components.

The components that go into storage-related hardware include flash storage, SSDs, hard disk drives, memory and processors.

As part of CRN’s 2025 Storage 100, here are 10 vendors storage component vendors taking their offerings to new heights.

Apacer

Chia-Kun Chang, CEO

Taiwan-based Apacer manufactures digital storage devices, including memory modules, industrial and enterprise SSDs, consumer digital storage products, and Internet of Things integrated applications. The company late last year started producing industrial-grade DDR5-6400 memory modules. The company also produces water-cooled computer components

Kingston Technology

John Tu, Co-Founder, CEO

Kingston Technology is a global manufacturer of memory and storage technologies, with customers including top-tier data centers, cloud providers, PC manufacturers and smart device manufacturers. On the company’s product line card are memory modules for PCs, servers and DRAM modules; SSDs for PCs, servers and industrial use; USB storage; memory cards; and embedded devices.

Kioxia

Nobuo Hayasaka, President, CEO

Kioxia started as the memory business of Toshiba but changed its name in 2019. The following year, it acquired the LITE-ON Technology’s SSD business. Kioxia is a manufacturer of memory technology for storage, consumer, industrial and automotive use; SSDs for enterprise, data center, and client use; and software for enterprise and data center applications.

Micron Technology

Sanjay Mehrotra, Chairman, President, CEO

Micron is one of the world’s largest memory and storage manufacturers. Its memory line includes DRAM components and modules, high-bandwidth memory, graphics memory and data center memory. On the storage side, the company manufactures SSDs for data center, client, automotive and industrial use as well as flash memory and memory cards.

Pliops

Ido Bukspan, CEO

The Pliops Extreme Data Processor is a device that improves how data is processed and SSD storage is managed with in-line transparent compression to free CPU bandwidth, a key-value storage engine to increase SSD performance, and full performance drive failure protection. Investors in Pliops include AMD, Intel Capital, Nvidia and Western Digital.

Samsung

Young-hyun Jun, CEO

Samsung is one of the world’s largest conglomerates as well as a top storage and memory manufacturer. It is the world’s largest producer of NAND flash memory, a key component of the SSDs and memory module the company and its OEMs produce. Samsung offers a full range of internal and portable SSDs, memory cards and USB flash drives.

ScaleFlux

Hao Zhong, Co-Founder, CEO

ScaleFlux develops System-on-a-Chip devices and software to enhance storage and memory subsystems’ bandwidth, capacity, security, capability and efficiency and help improve performance and sustainability at the system, rack, and data center levels. Its SoC controllers for enterprise NVMe SSDs integrate ScaleFlux Write Reduction Technology and metadata management to help increase efficiency.

Seagate Technology

Dave Mosley, CEO

Seagate is a top manufacturer of internal and external SSDs and hard drives for enterprise, professional and consumer applications and counts most systems vendors as OEM partners. The company also manufactures managed block storage and hard disk/SSD hybrid storage systems, as well as components for gaming and creative customers. Seagate also provides storage under the LaCie brand.

Solidigm

David Dixon, Kevin Noh, Co-CEOs

Solidigm was founded in late 2021 when Intel sold its SSD business to SK hynix and formed a new company. The company focuses on the development of enterprise SSDs and recently introduced such innovations as a liquid-cooling plate for SSDs as well as high-capacity PCIe SSDs with capacity of 122.88 TB.

Western Digital

Irving Tan, CEO

Western Digital early this year split into two public companies. The new Western Digital now encompasses the original company’s hard drive business, while its previous flash storage and memory business is a separate business under the Sandisk name.