Tag: solid state drives

Solid state drive prices to topple

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

ssdVolumes of scale mean the prices of solid state drives (SSDs) are set to fall.
Digitimes, quoting the technology manager of memory company Apacer, is estimating that prices for, example, of 256GB SSDs will tumble to as little as $70 in the second half of this year.
And a 128GB SSD could cost as little as $40 by year end, according to manager CK Chang.
He reckons that the price drops could well stimulate a far greater demand for the storage devices.
One of the reasons the prices are falling is because process technologies for the type of NAND flash memory used is migrating to 14 nanometre, 16 nanometre or 16 nanometre processes.
That means manufacturers get more NAND memory from a single silicon wafer.

 

SSDs make the notebook grade

Posted on December 17, 2014 by - News

seagate-hddBusiness users of notebooks can expect a plethora of notebooks in 2015 that use solid state drives (SSDs) rather than the traditional electromechanical storage.

SSDs are far faster at accessing operating systems and data than HDDs and Digitimes has talked to a number of suppliers that think their use will increase next year.

The main reason is that as SSDs proliferate, their prices will continue to drop and the report suggests that as many as a fifth of business notebooks will use them next year

SSDs are still expensive compared to HDDs however. Digitimes said that a 128GB flash drive will cost $60 in the next few months, but you can buy a one terabyte drive for that amount.

So the notebook vendors will probably use a combination of SSDs and HDDs in hybrid devices.

But it will be a while before notebooks intended for home use and using SSDs will be cheap enough for home use, although most analysts believe that time is not far away.

Storage sales down in 2013

Posted on February 11, 2014 by - News

ihs_storageShipments of storage products fell by five percent last year, said market research company IHS.

However, solid state drive shipments in 2013 doubled and the reason for the decline in the whole sector is because of contractions in the hard drive and optical disk drive sectors.

Shipments of storage including SSDs, conventional hard drives and optical drives totalled 755 million units. HDDs fell by seven percent to 444.4 million units, optical drives fell by 12 percent to 253 million units while SSDs rose by 82 percent to 57 million units, said IHS. The figures do not include non PC related drives.

The convential HDD sector suffered from the increase in the popularity of smartphones and tablets.  However, the enterprise PC sector is more promising than the consumer end of the show.

SSDs are likely to rise by 50 percent during 2014, reaching 189 million units in 2017, which will be half the size of the HDD market which is expected to total 397 million in that year.