SSD sales up last year, despite recession

PulsarSo it wasn’t all bleak last year, SSD manufacturers experienced a 14% increase in sales, along with a total of over 11 million drives sold. That’s a whole lot of memory chips.

The study was conducted by IDC, and the outlook is good. Here’s some of the positive things that they had to say:

* Reduced IT spending in the last 18 months has led to cutbacks in NAND semiconductor production, slowing the decrease in price of SSDs. Long term though, the decline in NAND memory cost will lead to lower price points, making SSDs, especially those with high capacities, a more viable alternative to hard disk drives in certain segments.
* IDC believes that the largest market opportunity for SSDs will be in PCs. This will come largely from the notebook market where consumers will pay the extra cost of an SSD to gain the performance benefits. The netbook and other micro-computing devices are also driving forces in the adoption of SSDs, albeit at lower capacities.
* SSDs are making gains in the enterprise space due to the desire for increased performance, better utilization, faster access times, and lower power consumption.

If you want to read the whole thing, you’ll have to pay of course, but I think we get the idea.

[via Storage Review]