Solid-State Drives shipments increased by 82% in the past year and the shipments of hard drives fell by 5% when compared to 2012. As per the new data results released by IHS iSuppli, a market research firm, the future of SSD market looks bright, as in the current year, the sales of the said storage media are said to increase by 30% when compared to last year.
“The SSD Sector is easily the most promising, when compared to a struggling HDD segment that remains huge, but is still trying to find its footing in a shifting environments,” said Fang Zhang, an analyst working for IHS iSuppli.
IHS ISuppli expects SSD shipments to grow by 50% in 2014 and is predicted to touch 260 million units in next three years. The research firm has also predicted that the future for mechanical hard drives looks bleak as the said storage media will only touch 230 million units sales figure by 2017.
This prediction made by IHS iSuppli looks a bit controversial as most of the analysts who have been following the storage market from the past decade and so are not agreeing to the said numbers.
William Blake, who works for a renowned Data Storage vendor has turned down the whole prediction as complete baseless. He said that shipment numbers cannot be categorized as sales numbers. He also agreed that SSDs are excellent for performance oriented applications. But at the same time come with a caveat of high price point and low capacity.
William added that Solid-State Drives market have a few advantages over mechanical hard drives. They are smaller in size and can be stuffed into super thin computing devices like tablets and PCs. Their data transfer rates are much faster when compared to hard drives. But when the price point is taken into consideration, mechanical HDDs are surely the winners. They are much slower, but are significantly cheaper and are still a viable option to consider.
Finally, William wants to conclude that there is “no one-solution fits all” in this industry and every storage media has its own pros and cons. But he agreed that SSDs do have a bright future ahead, but shrugged off the rumors that Solid-State Drives will take on the market on a complete note and will result in the death of hard drives and tape storage media.
