14 DAY TRIAL // According to one Asian market watcher, netbooks featured with solid state drives are beginning to be considered an endangered species. It appears that, currently, most netbooks are based on a traditional hard disk drive solution, whereas at the beginning of the year, SSD-based netbooks represented the majority of shipments on the market. The ratio between SSD and HDD-based netbooks is expected to continue to shift in favor of HDDs in 2009.
DRAMeXchange estimates that the percentage of SSD-equipped netbooks has plunged through 2008, with that number being expected to reach new lows next year. While in the first quarter of 2008, approximately 70 percent of all netbooks were shipped with an SSD storage solution, the following quarter, the number went down to around 66 percent. Q3 2008 saw an even steeper fall in numbers, as SSD-equipped netbooks represented just 30 percent of the market, meaning that the majority of such systems were featured with a traditional HDD storage solution.
As the aforementioned numbers also indicate, the market watcher now expects SSD-equipped netbooks to reach 20 percent in this quarter, while in Q1 next year, the number of netbooks shipped with an SSD storage solution will make for 10 percent of the total market. Towards the end of 2009, DRAMeXchange forecasts, the number will go as low as 8 percent.
One of the main reasons for which most netbooks are featured with an HDD storage solution, instead of an SSD, is because of the storage per price ratio, which clearly favors the former. Also, many netbook vendors are using cheaper, multi-layer cell-based Flash chips for their solid state drive, a fact that ultimately makes HDDs look as a much more reliable option, providing higher storage and faster performance.
The numbers don't actually indicate that SSD-equipped netbooks are going to disappear from the market, but there are certainly going to be less of them available in the upcoming future.