Silicon Motion’s decade-long growth drives a 580% return for investors.

Silicon Motion Technology Corporation (NASDAQ: SIMO), founded in 1995, has become a leading developer of microcontroller ICs for NAND flash storage devices. The company also designs and markets high-performance, low-power semiconductor solutions for OEMs. Among its customers is Nexcopy Incorporated, a Southern California technology company specializing in flash memory storage products.

Today, Silicon Motion holds more than 1,500 patents, with over 1,300 still pending final approval. Its annual revenue is around $540 million, underscoring the company’s strong position in the semiconductor and storage controller markets.

From an investor’s perspective, the company’s performance has been even more striking. A $1,000 investment made in August 2011 would be worth approximately $6,832 as of August 23, 2021—representing a gain of 583.19% over the ten-year period. This return accounts for price appreciation but excludes dividends, according to NASDAQ’s analysis.

Source: NASDAQ

Since August 2021: where’s SIMO now?

Back in late August 2021, Silicon Motion (SIMO) was trading in the low-$70s. Fast-forward to today and the tape tells a different story: as of September 22, 2025 the stock closed around $95, brushing an all-time closing high and marking a solid climb despite a very bumpy road in between.

What changed? The company kept shipping controllers—lots of them—and kept widening the moat. In 2024, SMI rolled out its SM2322, a single-chip USB 3.2 Gen2x2 portable SSD controller that hits 20 Gbps and scales to roomy 8 TB QLC builds. That’s catnip for phone-to-console workflows and the “throw it in the bag” creative set. Momentum like that doesn’t show up in a quarter; it shows up in a trend.

Then there’s the long game. At industry events in 2025, SMI teased a PCIe 6.0 client SSD controller (codename Neptune) with projected 25+ GB/s reads and 3.5 M IOPS, signaling where the ball is headed—even if broad client adoption waits until the 2030 window. It’s classic SMI: ship today, signal tomorrow, keep the design-win pipeline full.

Of course, it wasn’t a straight line up. The MaxLinear deal drama peaked and cracked (termination in 2023), sent the shares wobbling, and moved the fight to arbitration and courtrooms. Through it all, the company kept printing controllers, paying a dividend (announced $2.00/ADS for 2024), and talking product roadmaps—slow, steady, stubborn. That posture matters to multiples.

So where do we land versus that August 2021 snapshot? Call it this: SIMO today trades notably higher than those early-’21 levels, near record territory, after digesting a failed merger and a memory cycle. That resilience, paired with portable-SSD wins and next-gen PCIe signals, explains why the stock now lives closer to the mid-$90s than the low-$70s. In other words—Morris’ rule of thumb—execution begets altitude.

With in a few minutes of downloading Rufus one can determine the software does not make a USB CD-ROM flash drive.

We confirmed this with another article we found on the web from GetUSB.info and they explained how to burn ISO to USB. What they concluded, and so did we, is that Rufus will extract the content of an ISO file and copy those files to the USB flash drive, but the Rufus software doesn’t change the configuration of the device, to that of a CD-ROM.

What started this quest was not wanting to make a bootable Windows flash drive, but rather, find a way to make a USB read-only so the data on the flash drive would not be removed or deleted.

In addition to having the USB read-only for the content, it also makes things impossible for a virus to jump onto the flash drive and spread. Given (my day job) my company doesn’t want a flash drive with our content and logo to be able to spread a virus, so the only solution we found was making sure the USB stick was read-only in the first place.

GetUSB.info article explains what Rufus does and also how to make a USB CD-ROM flash drive, the right way.