SSD sales increasing

Solid state drives are quickly becoming more popular in both consumer and enterprise markets, and market revenues are expected to rise significantly in 2011.

SSD revenues

According to a recent study completed by iSuppli, revenues from solid state drive sales are expected to reach approximately $4.4 billion in 2011. During 2010, revenues reached $2.3 billion, meaning iSuppli anticipates 92.3 percent growth in the sector during this year. The fast expansion rate in the solid state disk department is not sudden, as revenues reached $1 billion for the first time in 2010.

Despite this growth, many experts considered 2010 a slow year because NAND Flash prices were high. In 2011, iSuppli anticipates solid state drive sales will be fueled by a growing demand for SSD-enabled mobile computing devices. Long-term growth at this rate is not sustainable, according to iSuppli, but the solid state drive industry should continue to expand at rates between 7 and 25 percent annually for the next few years.

SSD unit sales

In terms of unit sales, iSuppli predicts approximately 15 million solid state drives will be sold during 2011. This represents a 118 percent expansion in the industry, which sold 6.9 million units in 2010. While the solid state drive sales figures are a clear sign that the technology is becoming more popular and gaining a hold on the storage device industry, iSuppli found SSDs are not having a major impact on hard disk drives sales. During the first quarter of 2011, the firm anticipates 161 million sales of hard disk drivesl.

Factors behind growth

The iSuppli report attributes solid state drive growth to a number of critical factors. Chief among those factors is the technology's core architecture. Solid state drives use NAND Flash technology, meaning they have no moving parts and are able to read data extremely quickly. Hard disk drives, on the other hand, use spindles and magnetic forces to spin a disk and read its content. This limits the drive's read speeds and can cause the device to skip when used in mobile computing platforms. According to iSupply, the growing popularity of mobile computers is leading to more solid state drive sales.

The solid state drive's natural cohesiveness with mobile computing devices led iSuppli to predict the consumer sector will be the largest area for growth in 2011. While the enterprise will still use SSDs to reduce bottlenecks, consumers who want to deploy high-performance or ultra-thin computing devices are expected to lead the charge to solid state drive use.

Why SSDs are overcoming price limitations

The primary limitation of the solid state drive is widely reported - cost. SSDs are much more expensive to manufacture and therefore cost much more to purchase. As a result, high-capacity hard disk drives with terabytes of data storage space are often less expensive than solid state drives with just a few hundred gigabytes. For desktop computer use, this is quite limiting.

However, the area where solid state drives are experiencing the greatest area of growth is with mobile devices, where users typically need to store significantly less data and depend more on the cloud and removable storage devices to save their files. This is creating a market that focuses more on performance than storage space. From this perspective, the solid state drive is the clear victor.

For more information on SSDs, visit our RAM and SSD news and information page. If you have additional questions on SSDs, RAM memory, performance memory, and gaming, visit our product information section or contact our support center. If you're ready to take the plunge, you can use our Crucial Memory Advisor™ tool or Crucial System Scanner tool.