It could be that there was a process of consolidation starting. Soltek was a small player and for years I simply assumed they could not compete with giants like

It could be that there was a process of consolidation starting. Soltek was a small player and for years I simply assumed they could not compete with giants like Asus, Gigabyte and MSI, that were taking the hobbyist market. There was also ECS which was big in the OEM market, building boards for HP and the like. It could be they saw it coming that they would not exist in a few years, it might be that sales and profit were already going down. Just assumptions here, someone else might come along to confirm or deny this. By the way, I bought a Soltek board in 2003 with the then new sata controller. I read the specsheet a bit fast... It said the sata port would do software raid. The pata port would do ata and software raid. Of course this turned out to be true :) Linux crashed too often during busy I/O with regular disks. So I had to buy a separate sata card.