Market research firm IHS iSuppli predicted that a new generation of lower-cost and more appealing ultrabooks would help more than double global shipments of SSDs.
Worldwide SSD shipments are set to rise to 83 million units this year, up from 39 million in 2012, according to the market research firm. Shipments would keep climbing up to top 239 million units in 2016, about 40% of the size of the HDD market.
Built with an array of NAND flash memory chips, SSDs have been touted as an ultimate alternative external storage device to magnetic plate-based HDDs, because they not only can boot up PCs in a matter of several, buts also store and bring back data. Especially in 2012 when ultrabook hit shelves, they held promises of boosting up demand for SSDs, as microprocessor chip maker Intel set SSDs as standard external storage device of ultrabooks.
ultrabook hadn’t sold as well as expected, however, mainly due to premature manufacturing ecosystem which in turn resulted in unexpected gains in the production costs. So were sales of SSDs.
“The fate of the SSD business is closely tied to the market for ultrabooks and other ultrathin PCs that use cache drives,” said Ryan Chien, analyst for memory and storage at IHS.
“While SSD shipments rose by 124% last year, growth actually fell short of expectations because ultrabook sales faltered due to poor marketing, high prices and a lack of appealing features. However, if sales of the new generation of ultrabooks take off this year as expected, the SSD market is set for robust growth,” added he.
To boost up demand, ultrabook makers have done everything to lower prices. One example is a cheap ultrabook model that have cache SSDs, an extra storage space exclusively reserved for keeping and bringing up OS and other frequently to-be-used data.
The newest wave of ultrabooks loaded with Windows 8 has started to generate enthusiasm, with the superthin computers likely to pick up more steam this year. Upcoming ultrabooks based on Intel Corp.’s Haswell microprocessor architecture also have the potential to catch on with consumers. These factors should boost SSD prospects this year.
Drops in the average selling prices, ASPs of NAND flash memory also helped, too, alluring an increasing number of PC manufacturers to install the once-costly drives into computers.
Furthermore, in the enterprise sector, SSD use is growing thanks to product introductions from major vendors and startups alike.
As NAND rides out variable cost and scale curves in ever-more efficient manufacturing processes, such things as solid-state PCs, servers and storage arrays become more achievable and attainable. Recent developments around nonvolatile memories like STT-RAM and resistive RAM also hint at sustained performance improvements for SSDs beyond the drives’ current use of NAND flash memory.