Strong 2011 SSD shipment growth likely with higher popularity among consumers

TAIWAN: NAND Flash vendors have put strong expectation in SSD (Solid-State Drive) since the unit consumption is several times higher than embedded products as well as memory card and UFD.

That is, SSD has great potential in terms of NAND Flash consumption. From Consumer perspective, SSD transmission speed is twice faster than traditional HDD (Hard-Disk Drive) and featured with better power consumption and anti-shocking design.

With the potential growing demand from High-Definition multimedia and large files, SSD demand will be steadily pulled up given the falling Flash price in coming future.

SSD price did not fall significantly in 2009 and 2010 since NAND Flash has sustained in the stable higher level. Besides the application in higher server market, industrial/military market and high-end commercial notebook, regular consumer SSD is limited to the retail market while average capacity is recorded in 32GB/40GB.

SSD vendors planed their strategy focus by leveraging SSD as the main system drive and implementing traditional HDD as the data storage device. With the 2xnm technology migration in 4Q10 among NAND Flash vendors, we expect the cost advantage from technology migration can reflect in the SSD price. Since SSD product feature is quite attractive to consumers, the falling SSD price will effectively trigger the purchase willingness.

Given the consideration of higher penetration rate in system product and demand from retail market, DRAMeXchange forecast 2011 SSD shipment will increase 150 percent YoY to near 15 million units.