SSD Sales Will Be Record-Breaking in 2012, IDC Says

A combination of global factors is going to significantly encourage shipments of solid state drives throughout the year 2012.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) regularly publishes reports and research papers regarding marketing situations and expectations.

Its latest announcement deals with the market of solid state drives (SSD).

According to it, 2012 will be a good year for these NAND Flash-based storage units.

"2011 was a record year for the worldwide SSD market, with revenue more than doubling year over year due to strong SSD shipment growth in the enterprise and client segments," says Jeff Janukowicz, research director, Solid State Storage and Hard Disk Drive Components at IDC.

"The increasing use of flash in enterprise solutions, explosive growth of mobile client devices, and lower SSD pricing is creating a perfect storm for increased SSD shipments and revenue over our forecast."

The SSD industry revenue was of $5 billion in 2011 (3.9 billion Euro), a more than double increase (105%) over the $2.4 billion (1.87 billion Euro) of 2010.

IDC expects sales to keep on rising every year until 2015.

2012 may even prove more favorable for SSDs due to recent troubles on the HDD market.

While a drop in Flash memory prices was going to make the drives more appealing on their own, people will gravitate even more towards them because of the HDD shortage.

Back in late 2011, floods in Thailand ended up closing quite a few HDD and HDD component factories.

Western Digital was heavily impaired and, through its reliance on Nidec (supplier of HDD motors), so was Seagate, indirectly.

That drove hard disk drive prices much higher than usual, some even doubling in price (or more).

Thus, the price advantage of HDDs dropped, even though supply shortage proved less crippling than initially feared.

IDC expects SSD prices to fall below the $1 per gygabyte mark in the second half of 2012, further closing the gap.