14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives have been growing in popularity over the past year because, despite not having a storage capacity on par with hard drives, their performance is superior. SSDs have better read and write speeds and enable faster boot times and application loading. These elements are what allowed the selling of over 11 million units in 2009, as the IDC recently revealed. Nevertheless, it seems that this type of storage solution is still in its beginning stages. One company, Western Digital to be more precise, actually revealed that SSDs, even when combined with multimedia products, didn't even make up 2% of the total quarter revenue.
This revelation was made by the WD CEO during the most recent conference call with financial analysts. The company reported, on Thursday, a revenue of $2.6 billion for its second fiscal quarter ended on January 1, 2010. Hard-drive shipments amounted to 49.5 million units, with net income calculated at $429 million ($1.85 per share). Non hard-drive revenue, according to the Chief Financial Officer of WD, Timothy Leydon, including WD TV HD media set sales and SSDs alike, only amounted to $47 million. Nevertheless, considering that the same revenues only amounted to $36 million in the September quarter, it is clear that the SSD and WD TV HD sales are on a rapid rise.
“The combination of media players and solid state drives taken together are the fastest growing component of our business and they’re both growing and we anticipate they will both continue to grow,” John Coyne, chief executive officer of WD, said during the most recent conference call with financial analysts.
Company plans include focusing more on the high-performance SSD market instead of developing 15K RPM hard drives. However, even with a strong SSD marketing performance, the company's prediction is that, even three years from now, about 90% of the enterprise market will still be using hard drives.
“Our expectation [is] that within three years [over 90% of] the traditional enterprise space would be serviced by 2.5” 10K [HDDs] and that our solution for higher-performance than that would be addressed with solid-state drives,” Mr. Coyne said.
Currently, WD is selling SSDs for the embedded systems, data-streaming and media-appliance markets. The company intends to offer SAS-enabled (Serial Attached SCSI-enabled) SSDs by 2011.
“We expect to have an enterprise ready solid-state product line offering in 2011 and so we will continue to expand the current drive base of 2.5” 10K SAS, continue to expand that product line over the course of this year and follow up with an extension to the product line with higher performance products in 2011.” Mr. Coyne said.