Solid-state drives (SSDs) have quickly gained rather widespread coverage in the media, but the actual market share of SSDs will not become high this year due to rather high price levels.

According to DRAMeXchange, SSD market penetration rate in standard notebook market will be estimated to be 1%~1.5% in 2009 and will be below 10% in low-cost-PC segments since hard disk drives are still adopted as the mainstream storage devices.

Higher price has stumbled the extensive application and deeper market penetration for SSD. Given the fierce upward pricing trend for 16Gb and 32Gb in the first half of 2009, extensive market acceptance for SSD has been postponed due to the higher cost and profit margin decline. Demand is estimated to be less optimistic compared to the previous forecast in 2009, according to the market research firm.

SSD application can be briefly divided into two categories: “PC” and “non-PC”. As for penetration rate in PC market, the ratio of SSDs used inside notebooks and SSDs utilize inside low-cost PCs has kept declining and resulted in the sloppy overall SSD shipments. An SSD costs over 4 times higher than HDD in terms of the cost per gigabyte while software and storage compatibility still remain the concern for PC vendors.

DRAMeXchange claims that PC vendors are more cautious and conservative toward SSD development even though Microsoft has made some adjustments for SSD optimal application in the brand-new Windows 7. NAND flash price is expected to be much lower when 30nm and 20nm fabrication processes turn to the mainstream process technologies and SSD will be more popular in the market.

Tags: SSD, Flash