Santa Clara giant will be using the situation as an opportunity

Dec 13, 2011 22:01 GMT  ·  By

As analysts have already predicted, the problems on the hard disk drive market will cause some rise in SSD demand, so Intel, naturally, means to benefit from this as much as possible.

Indeed, since the company already said it expected $1 billion less from Q4 2012, it plans to turn everything around into an opportunity for solid state drives.

Intel has been doing its best to get companies to use its SSDs in their laptops, the same way it tried to get consumers to gravitate towards its NAND storage solutions.

Unfortunately, it hasn't actually been successful in this regard.

After all, the high-end market is clearly dominated by SSDs using SandForce controllers and which are made by OCZ, ADATA, etc.

Intel itself is reportedly making a series of such SSDs at last, so that obstacle, at least, won't be as jarring.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the consumer SSD front isn't the best place to be and, though the same cannot be said about the enterprise data center segment, the situation there is not stellar either.

While Intel SSDs did do well in reviews, and were adopted by a few data centers, they are still just a very minor presence.

Now that HDDs are going to be few for a while, and more expensive than usual, SSDs are bound to catch the eye of more prospective buyers.

No doubt the Santa Clara giant hopes for Ultrabooks to act as a catalyst, as soon as they find their way to affordability.

After all, their thinness makes it more or less impossible to integrate platter spinners, unless they are those 5mm HDDs from DSI (which didn't even exist as anything but a concept back in November).

The first and perhaps second quarter of 2012 will be the proving ground. Hopefully, SSD makers will all get into a price war and accelerate cost cuts.