Driven by a higher penetration of solid-state drives (SSD) in storage systems currently dominated by hard disks, and rising retail demand, the market for SSDs in terms of shipments is expected to grow by 150% to almost 15 million units in 2011.
From a consumer perspective, a SSD is twice a fast as a traditional HDD in data transmission speed, and has lower power consumption and usually comes with an anti-shock design. These advantageous features are becoming more needed to support large multimedia files and high-definition movies.
On the supply side, falling quotes for NAND flash chips will drag down price points for SSDs and make them a compelling alternative to HDDs in some market segments.
In 2009 and so far in 2010, overall price reductions for SSDs have remained slow due to insignificant changes in NAND flash prices. However, with major chip vendors recently ramping up their production on 20nm-class processes, NAND flash prices to drop soon to the level that is able to drive adoption of SSD.
Over the past two years, SSD demand mostly came from high-end PCs and servers targeted at enterprise, industrial, military and other specific applications, and the DIY channel which demands lower capacities ranging from 30GB to 40GB. The two segments represent opposite extremes of the storage market.