SSD market to reach 43 million units by 2013

The report forecasts global shipments of SSDs to reach 43 million units in 2013. It also predicts that most cost effective SSD solutions, which are currently around 16GB, will approach 256GB by 2013.

According to the report, which examines the rise of the SSD market and the challenges that remain ahead, the decreasing flash memory prices and the shift to mobile computing are pushing SSDs from the data center to the PC. It notes however, that this transition will not happen overnight due to a number of issues, including drive density limitations, cost and performance.

"In the last years, the adoption of SSDs in PCs and netbooks has been limited by speed, capacity and cost constrains,"

said Tareq Husseini, SanDisk's Middle East and Africa Sales Director.

"But when one examines the declining cost trends for flash, and the consumer's need for storage and the premium that users place on the benefits provided by SSDs, it is easy to see that there will be a clear demand for SSDs in the near future," he added.

"SSDs use a special type of flash memory that offers impressive storage capacity in tiny form factors. In line with our commitment being the leaders in flash technology, we hope to increase our market share in the SSD market with the introduction of our latest SSD products. It is a very competitive market but we believe that our combination of memory and controller technology will help us to achieve this", he added.

SanDisk aims to grab half of the SSDs market share for the mobile PC sector in 2010.

According to Husseini, SSDs, which are made from NAND flash memory chips, hold several advantages over common HDDs including being speedier, lighter and use far less power. SSDs also tend to be more rugged than a standard hard drive because the NAND flash memory they use lacks the moving parts found in a hard drive.