CRN’s 2026 Storage 100 honors 100 vendors dedicated to bringing technology for everything from backing up data to making it available for use with AI whether it’s on-premises and/or in the cloud.
The choice of components that make a storage system—the SSDs, the hard drives and the memory—have always played a vital role in how manufacturers designed and manufactured those systems. And for years, mass production and new manufacturing techniques have meant that component prices continued to fall on a per-gigabyte or per-terabyte basis, ensuring that businesses large and small could count on improving costs over time.
No more. At least not for 2026, where memory, SSD and disk prices are soaring thanks largely to massive data center buildouts due primarily to demand for AI. Hyperscale cloud companies are building new and larger data centers to meet the demands of AI, and the size of their orders have put them at the top of the priority list for supplies. Indeed, the production capacity of many hard drives and some SSDs have been sold out for all of 2026 and, in some cases, into 2027.
It’s the same situation with memory. Massive demand for high-band memory and DDR5 memory used in data centers have caused memory manufacturers to shift capacity away from consumer-grade products to products for enterprise use and particularly for cloud providers.
But despite the shortages, development of SSDs, hard drives and memory technology will continue as manufacturers look for ways to improve performance and get back to reducing their costs.
As part of CRN’s 2026 Storage 100, here are 10 vendors storage component vendors taking their offerings to new heights.
Apacer
Chia-Kun Chang
CEO
Taiwan-based Apacer, which is a strategic partner of Acer and in which Acer holds an equity stake, is a major producer of components for industrial, computing, gaming and IoT devices, has an extensive line of storage and memory products. Apacer’s SSD lineup includes PCIe, SATA and PATA, industrial USB, industrial card, eMM and specialty versions.
Broadcom
Hock Tan
President, CEO
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Broadcom is a global infrastructure technology developer that has built its business through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions. On the storage side, acquisitions of LSI, Brocade, CA Technologies and Symantec have been key, resulting in a wide range of products including storage adapters, controllers and ICs; Fibre Channel directors, switches and more; and PCIe switches.
Kingston Technology
John Tu
Co-Founder, CEO
Kingston was started in a garage in 1987 to develop the modern memory module and has since grown into a leading global manufacturer of memory and storage devices, with customers ranging from smart device makers to data center and cloud providers. The Fountain Valley, Calif.-based company’s storage business is centered around a wide range of SSDs and USB drives.
Kioxia
Hiroo Oota
President, CEO
Kioxia, founded in 2017 with the spinoff of Toshiba Memory Corp. from Toshiba, is one of the IT industry’s top manufacturers of SSDs and flash memory. The Tokyo-based company’s SSD portfolio includes models for client, enterprise and data center applications as well as for OEM partners, while its memory products span the full range of technologies.
Micron Technology
Sanjay Mehrotra
Chairman, President, CEO
Micron is one of the world’s top manufacturers of memory technologies, including innovations for AI, 5G, the intelligent edge and consumer devices. Its memory products go from DRAM components and modules to graphics, high-bandwidth and data center memory. The Boise, Idaho-based company also manufactures SSDs for data center, client, automotive and industrial use.
Pliops
Ido Bukspan
CEO
Ramat Gan, Israel-based Pliops, which counts AMD, Nvidia, Western Digital and Intel Capital among its investors, develops an advanced data acceleration technology for AI infrastructure. That technology, LightningAI, helps optimize GenAI inference infrastructure by cutting the number of GPU computes needed per chat query I/O and helping unlock seamless data retention, cost savings and performance for GenAI and LLM applications.
Samsung
Young Hyun Jun
Vice Chairman, CEO
South Korea-based Samsung is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of products and components for data center infrastructure, IT and mobile communications, and consumer electronics. The company’s SSD portfolio includes internally mounted and external portable models, while its memory line includes all manner of memory cards and USB drives.
Seagate Technology
Dave Mosley
Chairman, CEO
Seagate develops a wide range of external and internal hard drives and SSDs as well as data storage systems and enterprise storage services. Its drives target hyperscale cloud, edge, data center, video analytics, and personal and gaming devices. The Fremont, Calif.-based company recently introduced Mozaic, a new hard drive platform using HAMR technology to deliver extreme storage density at scale.
Solidigm
Xin Guo
CEO
Solidigm, founded in late 2021 as a subsidiary of SK hynix following that company’s acquisition of Intel’s NAND and SSD business, develops a full line of SSDs for high-capacity scalability to highest performance. The Rancho Cordova, Calif.-based company’s portfolio includes SSDs targeted at AI-optimized, write-intensive, read-intensive, high-capacity, energy-efficient and other applications, as well as its latest liquid-cooled SSDs.
WD
Irving Tan
CEO
Western Digital last year split into two, with its hard drive business now known as WD while its SSD and flash business became SanDisk. San Jose, Calif.-based WD has a full portfolio of hard drives including internal and external models for applications from data protection to gaming to surveillance to enterprise storage. WD this year unveiled a road map for 100-plus-TB hard drives.
