14 DAY TRIAL // While 2008 has, so far, been among the worst years experienced by the IT industry, 2009 was, while somewhat lighter on the losses, still quite affected by the economic recession. Even so, however, some markets continue to thrive, such as that of solid state drives, which performed remarkably well during 2009, reaching an annual growth of 14%. More specifically, over 11 million units were sold during last year and IDC predicts that shipments will continue to increase.
Pricing was one of the main factors in this marketing performance. The slowdown of IT spending over the past 18 months has led to production cutbacks in NAND semiconductors, slowing overall price reductions for SSDs. Still, in the long term, NAND memory and SSDs will reach lower price points as sales improve. This will make such storage solutions popular in certain storage segments, especially PCs.
"Despite lingering uncertainties around the economy, IDC remains positive on the outlook for SSDs and believes the trajectories for shipment and revenue growth are a source of optimism moving forward," Jeff Janukowicz, research manager, Hard Disk Drive Components and Solid State Drives at IDC, said.
IDC estimates that HDDs will lose ground in front of solid state drives, especially when implemented in notebooks and mininotebooks. This is expected because SSDs will not only have competitive price points and storage capacities, but also a better performance. They have better access times, a lower power consumption and an overall better performance.
"SSD adoption will continue to experience tangible growth given the nascent stage for SSD adoption coupled with many of the benefits inherent in SSDs," Janukowicz added. "We expect SSD vendors to achieve capacity and price points that make SSDs an attractive solution in the PC and enterprise markets where the value proposition of SSDs is compelling."
According to IDC, SSDs will also be quite well suited for data-center environments, "where there is a premium on high performance." The largest market opportunity, however, remains that of personal computers. Overall, shipments are expected to achieve a compound annual growth (CAGR) rate of 54% over the 2008-2013 period. SSD adoption is expected to see tangible growth during 2010.