Digitimes recently had a chance to talk to Eric Kao, chairman and CEO for Memoright, about the growing market for application-specific solid state drives (SSDs) and Memoright's strength in not only hardware manufacturing but also design capability for controller chips and firmware. Specializing in the design and manufacture of high-end and ruggedized SSDs, Memoright has expanded its product lineup for specialized applications including military, industrial control systems, aviation and business servers. The following is an excerpt of the conversation.
SSD industry still in its infancy
An industry has a learning curve to become mature. For example, the NAND flash industry took three years for its learning curve. The SSD industry seems to have a long learning curve due to the many technical problems that it needs to overcome.
The PC market for SSDs has also been slow to develop. A couple of years ago people started talking about the hard drive (HDD) to SSD transition, but the progress has been a disappointment. Price is a big issue. There is no reason for a US$399 or US$599 notebook to be equipped with a US$100 SSD despite SSD's numerous advantages over HDD.
When the transition from CRT to LCD took place, the price difference had been brought down to about one fold. Looking at the price difference between an SSD and HDD used in consumer notebooks, the gap is still huge.
But still, the market is growing in select segments. In recent years, SSDs have gradually extended to markets for commerce, industry, cloud computing and personal computers.
SSD for data centers: A big market but few players
While the adoption of SSDs for consumer notebooks is slow due to the drives' less-competitive price points compared with HDDs, SSDs, however, are seeing growing adoption among data center servers which require storage devices with low power consumption and less heat. Data center operators such as Google and Facebook favor using SSDs over HDDs in their installations, as they use significantly less power and generate less heat.
How promising is the market for server SSDs? Startup Fusion-io began trading its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in early June 2011. Facebook is Fusion-io's biggest client.
Many memory module companies have stepped into the SSD market, but most of them are in the area for mass-market consumers due to lack of R&D capability. Worldwide, less than 10 companies are able to make inroads into the specialized applications that require a certain degree of performance stability and data protection, and Memoright is among the handful of players.
Memoright has an excellent R&D team for SSD controller chips, firmware, software and hardware, and is further expanding its lineup of flash memory storage products for high-end commercial servers, industrial embedded systems, tablet computers and handheld devices.
Prior to Memoright, Kao served as founder and chairman of IC design service company Socle Technology, and previously CEO of IT distributor Xander International. Kao joined Memoright as chairman and CEO in 2008.