Solid State Drives are relatively expensive seen to price vs. capacity. The NAND flash chips that are used to store data are simply very expensive to make, but during the second half of 2012 NAND and the SSD market are expected to reach a milestone, 1 GB storage for less than 1 dollar.
The key to lower cost per gigabyte is lower manufacturing costs and with new and smaller transistors the NAND flash manufacturers will be able to reduce costs further. SanDisk has already revealed that it will introduce 19nm NAND flash this year and Intel is expected to introduce a new series of SSDs dubbed King Crest that will use 20nm NAND flash in Q3.
While the manufacturing costs of regular MLC NAND flash is dropping OCZ Technology continues to develop new retail products based on TLC NAND flash. These units will be able to store 50% more data per circuit and thus boost capacities significantly.
The first step, according to analysts at TrendForce, will come in the latter half of 2012 when SSD NAND flash prices will go below 1 dollar per gigabyte. This is critical to make the SSD technology more appealing to the public compared to regular storage solution and the consumption of NAND flash memory is expected to increase from 5.1% in 2011 to 15% in 2012 for SSDs.
The SSD NAND flash market is expected to get a boost from Intel’s coming Ivy Bridge processors that in turn is believed to give the Ultrabook the hardware it really needs to get anywhere. Ultrabooks generally use SSD units for storage.
Source: X-bit Labs
