SSDs Rack Up Major Growth Gains; Trend Expected to Continue For Several Years

SSDs continue to gain market share versus HDDs, according to a recent report from market research analysts IHS.  This trend is forecast to continue for several years.  SSD shipments in PCs are forecast to grow by a whopping 122% from 2012 to 2013!

Chart source: ihs-isuppli

As shown in the chart above (spanning 2012 through 2017), HDD shipments in PCs are anticipated to realize a negative compound annual (growth) rate of -2.9%, while PC SSD shipments are forecast to see a compound annual growth rate of a robust 48.0%!  Although HDDs total sales dollars were at a record $30.6 billion last year, this was likely a “flash in the pan” driven largely by higher post-Thailand-floods average selling prices, and not a reflection of total number of units shipped.  Now that post-flood pricing levels have stabilized, HDD sales dollars will likely drop significantly as the total units shipped declines.

At the same time, The SSD segment is becoming extremely competitive. Ultrabooks and notebooks are migrating steadily towards SSDs as the preferred OEM storage offering.  A vigorous enterprise SSD market helped close out 2012 at record-high revenue levels for SSDs.  A plethora of new enterprise-level products, combined with new application acceleration software vendors, is fueling enormous growth in this segment.

The enterprise market will continue to be the primary beneficiary of SSD engineering developments, as the evolution to NAND Flash of ever-smaller architectures allows for ever-larger capacities, greater endurance and greater reliability. As the cost per GB declines and endurance goes up, the key metric of “total cost of ownership” (TCO) favors SSD usage at an accelerated rate.  The IHS analysis can be viewed here.

Feature image source: Canada Newswire