Comment by wtallis

I think SK Hynix's NAND business may have already been bigger than Intel's NAND business when they made that acquisition. Certainly by then SK Hynix had recovered from being late to the 3D NAND transition, while Intel was on a worse technological trajectory with their roadmap that diverged from the rest of the industry.

Your impression that they were at all new to the SSD market is largely due to the fact that SK Hynix operated mainly as a component supplier, and has never pursued promotion of their own retail SSD brand the way Samsung does. Hynix was a major player in the NAND industry before the SSD market as we know it even existed, and has been a major supplier of SSDs to PC OEMs for as long as PC OEMs have been buying SSDs in large volumes.