The market for mechanical drives have been tough with price inflation after floods in Thailand and earthquakes in Japan. At the same time SSD units have been dropping in price, which means that SSDs might replace HDD as the primary storage media in 3-5 år.
Analysts at DigiTimes Research says the development in the storage industry points that SSD units could replace mechanical harddrive even if they are intended as pure storage media in the coming five years. Primarily they point to the mainstream market, which means retail systems where maximal storage capacity is not that important.
DigiTimes Research points to that prices for SSD units have dropped by 50% in H1 2012 and simply made them more competitive in terms of Gigabyte per dollar than ever before.
If we look at the local market we can see that SSD units are on average 10 more expensive per gigabyte, but at the same time they are becoming large enough to minimize the need for mechanical units – at least in notebooks.
In 3-5 years the price difference have been reduced further and if we keep the same pace with improving the capacity and dropping prices it should not be impossible for traditional harddrives to be sent to dedicated storage units and the more demanding users on the market. Are mechanical harddrives going to become a rarity and SSD become the standard so soon, only the future can tell.
