14 DAY TRIAL // Until as late as last year, solid state drives had not yet gained enough momentum, and hadn't reached a high enough storage capability and reliability to truly be appealing on the enterprise front. While the small form factor and fast access times were definitely assets, data centers still preferred HDDs because they were already a mature technology and had higher capacities. These facts haven't changed, but SSDs have come a long way in the meantime, to the point where they are both capacious and reliable enough to be considered as replacements for HDDs, at least in some situations.
To get a better idea of what the market can expect, Origin Storage commissioned a research into the estimated growth of the SSD market as a whole. The final prediction was that, until 2015, shipments of such devices would grow by 90% each year, leading to 4.1 million in 2015. In tandem, the revenue growth rate will be of 55 percent. This will be possible because of falling prices and developments in the fields of high data traffic applications like transaction processing.
"That's a growth rate of 90% per annum, which will be complemented by an annual revenue growth rate of 55 per cent, which reflects the rapid take-up and the falling prices that we are continuing to see in the SSD marketplace," said Managing Director of Origin Storage, Andy Cordial, who commissioned the research. "If you delve into the report, you find that the magnetic hard drive market is predicted to shrink considerably over the next five years, with the slack being more than taken up by SSD technology."
"It's interesting that the report notes that SSDs - in the enterprise market at least - are still in their infancy. The growth we are observing in the market is incredible, as we're also seeing firms such as Intel and Kingston releasing SSDs in lower capacities of around the 30 gigabyte mark, allowing them to be used as boot drives," Mr. Cordial added.