Historical Milestones in WW SSD Industry

Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba invented the flash memory (both NOR and NAND types) in 1980.

Since the arrival of the first SSDs based on NAND, we record in an Excel table all the announcements of SSDs with the name of the vendor, the model, the form factor, the minimum ad maximum capacities, the R/W transfer rate, the interface and the price and price per gigabyte when available. Total now is more than thousand entries for 141 companies. In fact today there are 160 SSD makers in the world but some of them never made official announcements and are not included on our table.
 
In 1991, SanDisk Corporation created what is probably the first SSD, a 20MB drive sold at an OEM price of $1,000.

The most expansive SSD was the 2.5-inch 40GB A25FB from Adtron launched in 2004 at an OEM price of $11,500, the first SATA flash drive according to the company. The highest price par gigabyte was $2,000 for the 2GB 2.5-inch IDE Flash Drives by Simple Technology in 2001.

SSD were offered in a lot of different form factors: 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch with different height (up to 15mm), 3.5-inch, M2, mSATA, Express Card, Mini PCIe and finally PCIe with NVMe becoming now a first choice to compensate the slower transfer rate of SATA and SAS interfaces.

Today the highest capacity units announced are the Samsung 32TB SAS SSD in 2.5-inch form factor expected to be released next year and the monstrous 60TB SAS SSD by Seagate, but in 3.5-inch form factor, anticipated for some time in 2017.

Maximum transfer rate revealed was in 7,200MB/s read on 2.5-inch PCIe 3.0 Z-Drive R5 by OCZ Technoogy (now Tosghiba) with Marvell co-developed Kilimanjaro in 2012 and 5,500MB/s write on 2.5-inch PCIe NVMe Powered U.2 from Liqid with Micron in 2016.

Record for lower access time is just one microsecond on OCZ 2.5-inch 6Gb SATA Vertex Limited Edition with MLC in 2010.

Today there is one SSD for three HDDs sold. According to Trendfocus 30.8 million of these flash drives were shipped in 1Q16 and 34 million in 2Q16, Samsung being largely the leader.

82 million were sold in 2014, 103 million in 2015, 135 million in 2016 (corresponding to a total of 51EB capacity or 377GB per drive), and analysts forecast 212 million in 2020 for a CAGR of 16%.