Both leading makers of hard disk drives - Seagate Technology and Western Digital - did not recognize the potential of solid-state drives several years ago, which not only allowed companies like OCZ Technology to become strong players on the storage market, but which also thwarts these companies from becoming significant players on the SSD market at the moment. In fact, sales of WD's solid-state drives were much less than a million of units last quarter.

"We shipped one million of non-HDD units, including solid state drives, media players and routers," said Stephen Milligan, the president of Western Digital, during a conference call with financial analysts.

Western Digital shipped record number of hard disk drive units per quarter - 71 million - in calendar second quarter of 2012. Unfortunately, it appears that WD is not very successful with its media players, routers and solid-state drives as the company does not provide split between three types of products in its financial results.

While companies like OCZ Technology, Corsair Memory and others do not publicly disclose how many SSDs they ship quarterly, OCZ did say that it sold 100 thousand of its latest Vertex 4 solid-state drives during the quarter ended on May 31, 2012 (Q1 FY2013). Since OCZ Vertex 4 are among many product lines offered by OCZ, it is clear that the company shipped several hundreds of thousands of SSDs per one quarter, which should be at least comparable to the number of units sold by WD, a much larger company.

It is hard to estimate the total available market of solid-state drives these days, but due to constantly dropping prices it should be growing pretty rapidly as consumers and makers of personal computers embrace SSDs for their performance, reliability and low power consumption.

Tags: WD, Western Digital, SSD, NAND, Flash