SanDisk Believes 2012 Is a Big Year for SSDs

Those who believe that SSD sales will be lackluster have already said their piece, so SanDisk is taking its turn at painting a brighter picture for the storage devices.

SanDisk is one of the primary suppliers of solid state drives around the world, so it makes sense that it would look at its future in the most optimistic way.

Sure enough, the company has just stated that it expects the SSD market to perform very well in 2012 and beyond.

As the technology matures and prices fall, shipment levels will rapidly rise, the company believes.

Both consumer and enterprise units are believed to be on track for fast positive sales evolution.

SanDisk's prediction is at odds with the one Western Digital made not long ago, in which the HDD maker said that, even with ultrabooks factored in, SSD sales wouldn't actually be groundbreaking.

Then again, SanDisk has a good reason to place higher hopes: its SSD business has actually been successful.

"For the client SSD markets, the combination of the increasingly attractive price point and the significantly improved user experience is fueling consumers' transition to SSDs from hard disk drives,” said Sanjay Mehrota, chief executive officer and president of SanDisk.

“We have been successful with our small form-factor client SSD. [...] We have also began sampling our high-performance client SSDs at PC OEMs.”

It is true that SSDs are more expensive than HDDs in general, and they will probably always stay that way. It also bears noting that HDDs have exhibited the ability to constantly leap in capacity, always holding onto their advantage.

Nevertheless, makers of NAND Flash storage devices have been doing fairly well even under these conditions, so it makes sense that things will get better after some price cuts.

“We expect 2012 to mark the inflection point of SSD growth for SanDisk, with both the enterprise in client markets becoming strong contributors to our revenue growth in 2012 and beyond,” stated Mehrota.