History (1999): Record Unit Shipments of SSDs in 1998

According to the 1999 Solid State Disk and Flash Memory Market and Technology Report ($875), published by Peripheral Research, these are heady days for those involved in solid state and flash memory manufacturing.

SSD and flash memory suppliers reported record shipments across the board and the future only looks brighter.

Reduction in DRAM pricing and advances in bit production technology have pushed prices of both solid state and flash memory down to levels that make them far more attractive as memory options.

SSD at $16.25/MB
Prices for SSD drives reached the $16.25/MB level in 1998 and should decline to $4/MB by year 2002. This has made SSD storage far more feasible for a number of applications, including RAID systems and cache memory for Internet servers.

The advent of RAID has been a boon to the SSD market. By adding just 1 or 2 SSD drives to a RAID system, overall performance can be dramatically increased over that seen in an all-rigid disk drive system. As the popularity of RAID systems continues to grow, sales for SSD drives should continue to break records.

Solid state memory used in cache applications is expected to increase 425% from 1998 to 2002. The growth in Internet usage is the main thrust for the increase in cache memory use. As the need for high-speed connections becomes more prevalent, the use of solid state memory in cache applications will become more commonplace.

Quantum, Imperial Technologies and Seek Systems all hold key market shares. Total shipments for all solid state disk drives are expected to increase from 11,900 units in 1998 to 35,200 in 2002.

4.4 million flash units sold in 1998
The story for flash memory is much the same. Decreasing prices have opened up new markets and expanded existing markets for flash memory products. The birth of the digital camera market sparked a revolution in flash memory. CompactFlash and Smart Media were both introduced to primarily serve the digital camera markets. As the digital camera market explodes, so will demand for flash memory products, particularly CompactFlash.

The CompactFlash design was introduced by SanDisk in 1994 and subsequently adopted by others. Currently, CompactFlash sales make up 60% of the total flash market. By the year 2002, an expected 19,893,000 CompactFlash units will be sold out of a total flash market of 30,112,000 units, up from 2,649,000 CompactFlash cards and 4,392,000 total units in 1 998.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 134 on March 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.