SanDisk today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Pliant Technology, Inc., a developer of enterprise solid state drives (SSD). Under the terms of the agreement, SanDisk will pay approximately $327 million in cash and provide certain equity-based incentives. The transaction, which has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies, is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory review and approval, and it is expected to close by the end of SanDisk's second fiscal quarter.

Pliant currently sells high performance enterprise solid state drives based on the SAS protocol for enterprise storage applications. The company's product roadmap also includes PCIe-based solutions for high-performance compute servers. Pliant is a leader in the use of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND in enterprise SSDs, and the lower cost of MLC is a key enabler for the broad adoption of SSDs in the enterprise market.