14 DAY TRIAL // Solid State Drives or SSDs for short are rapidly gaining market shares in the all too crowded computer storage market. Once reserved only for time critical enterprise applications and servers, Solid State Drives are nowadays found even in laptops in conjunction with the traditional way of storing data in the hard disk drive. As they have numerous advantages over the traditional hard drives (no moving parts, lower power consumption, better speeds) their manufacturers are steadily dropping prices to make SSDs more affordable and thus hoping to gain a wide spread market acceptance.
According to new research from IDC centered on the SSDs market, the performance and mobility of these devices are finally gaining the upper hand over their still steep price as revenues generated from SSD sales will climb from $373 million in 2006 to $5.4 billion in 2011. Solid State Drives are used as a complement hardware part to a traditional storage hard disk drive, as they still have less storage capacity than their older brethren.
"For many years SSDs have sat on the fringe of the digital universe, but a tremendous opportunity is ahead for SSD storage," said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager, Solid State Drives, who was cited by IDC in its study. "Today, SSDs are about delivering a premium solution. In the future, SSDs will be about delivering the right solution to the right market as technology advances and requirements converge."
As the PC market evolves, it presents the most favorable environment for the development of new SSD related technologies and it is currently transferring the solid disks from servers to desktop and mobile computing platforms. Apart from the traditional PC market, the IDC study reveals an additional area where SSDs will become more important: "extremely hostile work environments" that would damage or destroy an ordinary hard disk in conjunction with the need for better I/O solutions for enterprise computing.