SSD Market Will Exceed $14 Billion by 2015

The solid state disk market is closely following a conservative 2007 forecast, according Solid State Disk Market Outlook 2010 – Single-User (128 pages, $5,000), report from Objective Analysis: solid state disk sales into notebook PCs will reach $7 billion by 2015. The combined SSD market for all segments will exceed $14 billion by 2015. Roughly 170 companies now participate in the solid state disk market. Twenty eight of these companies are profiled in this report.

No other solid state disk market has the potential of reaching the volumes of solid state disks in notebook PCs. With very low penetration this could still become a $1 billion market as soon as 2014. With a more optimistic view the market could surpass $39 billion by that time. Solid state disks’ impact on the HDD market will be limited. Our forecast estimates that solid state disk unit shipments will decrease HDD unit shipments into the PC market (roughly 1/3 of the entire HDD business) in 2015 by 21%, or 115 million units. The solid state disk will increase NAND chip shipments, but not as much as NAND manufacturers once hoped.

Certain new technologies threaten the notebook PC solid state disk market and could keep it from materializing. These include the Hybrid HDD and other means of adding NAND to the PC, like Intel’s Turbo Memory or Braidwood products.

Users are intrigued by solid state disks but are reluctant to pay 20 times as much for the same amount of storage, or ten times as much for one third the storage of an HDD. Since HDD price per gigabyte declines at a rate similar to that of NAND solid state disks will not approach the price of capacity HDDs over the term of our forecast.

As always, customers will continue to demand increasing HDD capacities in their PCs, as. It is unlikely that HDDs in notebooks will ever see the kind of conversion from HDD to NAND that occurred in the MP3 player market. Even with the modest assumptions made in this report, a small penetration of very low capacity solid state disks will still account for more gigabyte shipments in 2015 than the entire NAND market of 2011.

This report takes an exhaustive look at the Solid-State Disk (SSD) markets for notebook & desktop PCs, the enterprise, and other applications with technical information, market dynamics, a forecast, and a competitive analysis of 28 noteworthy SSD makers.