SSDs Get Really Affordable in 2012, Gartner Says

The price problem that solid state drives have has not yet gone away, but a certain analyst firm believes it will be resolved by next year, meaning that the mainstream market will finally have an easier time of integrating them.

Solid state drives, those storage units, usually of the 2.5-inch form factor, which are built out of NAND Flash chips, might finally reach some level of affordability.

Ever since they were created, they have been more or less restricted to systems owned by those with solid finances, not counting non-consumer applications of course.

Over the past year, however, they have been getting less and less costly, all the while gaining higher maximum capacities.

The main reason for this is that NAND Flash memory chips have been moving on to more advanced manufacturing processes.

With this to drive prices and power consumption lower while also expanding capacity, it is just a matter of time before real affordability is reached.

It is Gartner's opinion that 2012 will bring about enough of a decrease in NAND Flash memory that HDDs will really have a battle on their hands.

Consumer demand will also play quite the part, as will the fact that solid state drives are finally maturing, so to speak.

All in all, next year might just see SSDs being priced at $1 per Gigabyte. This, along with their speeds, will make them even more formidable than they are now, both on the consumer market as well as the enterprise segment.

That said, it definitely is starting to seem as though HDDs will be pushed out of the market sooner instead of later, or at least reduced to a niche.

Then again, there is that fact that HDD platters can now store 1 TB of data each, and Uranium could take things much further, to the point where a single HDD will be able to store as much data as whole data centers of today.