14 DAY TRIAL // The market for SSDs has grown bigger and bigger lately, reaching $15.1 billion in 2014, with an even bigger headroom for growth, of around 40 per cent, for next year.
Apparently, the new market report published by Transparency Market Research valued the global solid state drive market at around $15.1 billion in 2014 and says that it is expected to reach $229.5 billion by 2022. The same market research firm expects a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.7 per cent from 2015 to 2022.
However, for their market analysis, the TMR takes into account solid-state storage units in general, including NAND flash-based storage in Apple iPad tablets, so the report also considers the sales of iPads as being part of the SSDs’ success. This means that they don’t really attribute this success to society's sudden preference for SSDs.
Even though users don't pay money for Apple tablets because they contain SSDs but because they come from Apple, the gains go to SSD manufacturers nevertheless, so the figures are there.
True affordability may follow, but SSDs are already selling like hotcakes
Naturally, in 2014, client SSD was the largest market segment, offering an 88.1 per cent of the revenue and 68.7 per cent of the market volume, with the 80GB and below capacities being the best selling products in the entire SSD product offer, accounting for approximately 36.3 per cent of the global SSD market revenue. The reason for this is fairly simple: the Serial ATA SSDs are the most popular because most PCs today use this interface.
It seems that, due to higher performance requirements in data centers and server companies, SAS and PCIe SSD segments are expected to overtake the SATA SSD segment, and while the bleeding edge PCIe will still cost a fortune, the prices of the SATA SSDs will eventually drop and they will become just as affordable as HDDs. However, to reflect that even when big prices are involved performance matters the most, the PCIe SSDs are expected to be the fastest-growing segment until 2022.
According to the Transparency Market Research, as was to be expected, the Asia Pacific region was the largest SSD market revenue contributor in 2014, accounting for 57.0 per cent of the global SSD market.