OCZ Technology is primarily known for its high-performance dynamic random access memory (DRAM) modules aimed at performance-minded end-users. The company also makes power supply units, USB drives and even notebooks, but it looks like the company’s main growth driver for the future is solid-state drive lineup. According to chief exec of OCZ, SSDs are already entering the mainstream market and their popularity will continue to increase.

“I guarantee that if I gave you numbers, which I cannot right now, your jaw would be left hanging open. […] SSD technology is moving past the early adoption stage and is really going mainstream. […] I did not believe that people would go and buy a 120GB SSD for the same price that they could buy 2TB of hard drive space, but they do. They feel that performance gap is significant enough,” said Ryan Petersen, chief executive officer of OCZ Technology, in an interview with Computerpoweruser magazine.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are indisputably faster compared to hard disk drives (HDDs), but their cost-per-GB is undeniably much higher. At present even 250GB may not be enough for systems aimed at multimedia and games. It is obvious that for those, who want to have performance at any cost, SSDs is a great choice, but there are also those, who demand maximum capacity, which solid-state drives just cannot provide.

Another obstacle on the way of SSDs is software and content piracy. It is not a secret that many end-users want to make reserve copies of video games distributed on dual-layer DVDs or 50GB movies distributed on Blu-ray disc media and some users download BD remuxes or dual-layer DVD images to burn them onto bulk media. At present pirated or copied software or movies that require 10GB – 50GB of space are not common, but the increase of demand towards storage space is rather clear.

As a result, going forward we are likely to see high-end PCs with both SSDs and HDDs in order to use the best of both worlds: high performance of flash and high capacities of hard drives. It is a big question, though, whether solid-state drives are a part of mainstream personal computers.

Mr. Petersen also said that according to NPD Group OCZ Technology is the No. 2 supplier of SSDs via e-tailers. The head of OCZ did not reveal who is the No. 1 though.

“I have seen the NPD data for etailers and we are in the No. 2 position,” he said.

Tags: OCZ, SSD