SanDisk and the 20-megabyte flash drive that cost a thousand dollars
In 1991 a young company called SunDisk built IBM a solid-state drive in the shape of a laptop hard disk. It held 20 megabytes and cost about $1,000. The idea behind it, storage that kept data for years with no power and no moving parts, now sits in almost every phone and camera.
Eli Harari, Sanjay Mehrotra and Jack Yuan founded SunDisk in 1988 in California. Harari had developed the floating gate EEPROM, a chip that showed semiconductor storage could be reliable and durable, and the trio set out to sell memory that needed no external power to hold its contents. The following year's IBM drive was the first flash-based SSD in a 2.5-inch hard disk format.
In 1992 came FlashDisk, cards that slotted into the PC Card expansion bays of laptops and handheld computers. Rival products needed a battery to keep their data, while these did not. By the time the line ended in 2002, the largest version held 8 gigabytes. On November 8, 1995, the firm renamed itself SanDisk to avoid being confused with Sun Microsystems and floated on Nasdaq under the ticker SNDK, selling 16 million shares at $10 each.
Partnerships and purchases followed. In 2000 SanDisk and Toshiba agreed to build a joint plant making advanced flash, mainly for digital cameras. The company moved into music players in 2005 with the Sansa e100, and within a year only Apple sold more digital audio players in the United States. Over the next decade it bought a string of storage specialists, among them Pliant Technology for $327 million in 2011. Harari received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from Barack Obama in 2014.
Western Digital agreed in October 2015 to buy SanDisk for $19 billion; when a Chinese investor withdrew, the final 2016 price fell to $16 billion. The flash business was spun off again on February 24, 2025, returning to Nasdaq under its original SNDK ticker, and rejoined the Nasdaq-100 on April 20, 2026.
Source: Sandisk
