Tight supply of hard disk drives will persist throughout the first half of next-year, which means that solid state drives’ chances to gain market share are increasing. But although SSDs will indisputably gain attach rate, they will not help to solve the issue of hard drives shortages.

“I think it will be pretty obvious, when you see the response by the industry, SSD attach rates will go up. They are at low-single digits [less than 5%] today so I do not expect that to be a huge aide in solving the shortages that are in the disk drive industry today,” said Brian Gladden, chief financial officer of Dell, during a conference call with financial analysts.

The biggest problem with SSDs is that they cost more than hard disk drives and therefore not a lot of end-users are willing to buy personal computers with solid-state drives instead of hard disk drives. Another issue is that by far not all PCs can adopt SSDs due to necessity of qualification and positioning of PCs.

What computer makers can do is to release systems where SSDs are installed by default and try to improve their popularity among end-users. For example ultra-thin systems as well as so-called ultra-books definitely take advantage of solid-state drives increase of their adoption will drive attach rates of SSDs.

“We will have an ultrabook that will be later out and will arrive late in the fiscal year,” added Mr. Gladden.

Tags: Dell, SSD, HDD, Business