14 DAY TRIAL // It is no mystery that solid state drives are getting more and more widespread, but for those that would like to know better why this is happening, Micron touched on the subject during its weekly conference call with financial analysts.
Solid state drives have several advantages compared to the more traditional hard drives, which have been around for far longer.
While still far from matching HDDs in terms of capacity, SSDs are faster, silent, usually more compact and more reliable even, according to some standards.
The only real disadvantage they have, besides the aforementioned capacity limitation, is the price, which puts them in the high-end segment by default.
At one point, the server and data center market, where access times are important, was one of the main driving forces behind SSDs sales.
Now, the consumer segment is seeing more and more systems equipped with them, particularly laptops.
In fact, Micron went as far as saying that notebooks are the primary factor behind the increasing demand for this type of NAND Flash storage solutions.
“The notebook segment is still driving that growth,”explained Steve Appleton, chief executive officer of Micron, during the recent conference call with financial analysts.
Of course, the continued merits of the enterprise sector did not go by ignored, and neither did desktops.
“Enterprise is starting to play off pretty nicely, as I said, because of the technology development around intelligent controllers and firmware development around making these things more reliable from an enterprise requirement standpoint. [...] The combination of some OEM desktop pre-configured machines as well as some aftermarkets that have combined for some pretty impressive growth,"
The other element seen as beneficial for solid state drives is the newly established tablet market. By all accounts, the real concern for micron is probably rival SSD makers, like OCZ, which just announced the sale of its 1 millionth unit.