Tablets to Cause NAND Flash Sales to Erupt

With the rapid rise of the solid state drive and of more and more mobile devices, NAND Flash memory has been selling quite well recently, to the point where iSupply is now predicting a very bright future for this type of chips, especially when it comes to the ones used in tablets.

Flash-based storage solutions have multiple advantages over HDDs, in spite of their higher prices.

Among the most notable are high data transfer rates, high reliability, physical endurance as a result of no moving parts and, of course, better energy efficiency.

iSupply is now predicting that the NAND Flash memory servicing the tablet market will see an especially alert rate of growth by the end of 2011.

As one would expect, the positive performance and outlook on the slate market will drag the NAND segment up with it.

Thus, sales of such flash chips for tablets are expected to reach, by the end of 2011, 1.5 billion gigabytes, a significant jump over the 428 million of this year.

Needless to say, the iPad will be the main catalyst of this leap, though other slates are finally starting to leave an imprint on this segment.

"Tablets have stolen some cachet from netbooks," said Michael Yang, senior analyst for memory and storage at iSuppli.

"And while the tablet segment suffers from some of the same weaknesses as netbooks, devices like the iPad have wowed consumers with their responsiveness and media interaction - due in part to the use of NAND flash for data storage, instead of a traditional hard disk drive," Yang added.

As far as the years following 2011 are concerned, the market analysts believe that a figure of 3.5 billion will be reached by tablet NAND shipments.

Said figure is said to be on track to grow to even more than 8.8 billion GB in 2014, since electronics will start to use more storage space by then.