The global solid state drive market is projected to witness high growth in the years to come due to rising volume of data. Factors, such as rapid digitization, high penetration of internet and growth of the online commerce industry can propel market growth. High adoption of laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices has increased the volume of digital data. This is expected to increase the average storage capacity of individuals in future. In addition, high resolution of images and videos has increased the content size, which is likely to fuel the demand for storage solution with high capacity.
Advantages of SSD over hard disk drive (HDD) is expected to support market growth. SSD offers high performing features, including low power consumption, encryption, error correction, and garbage correction. Enterprise applications need high-performance storage along with high throughput, which can be fulfilled by solid state devices. They are extensively utilized in personal computers, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. These drives are also considered a feasible option for data centers as they offer high speed data transfer, hierarchical storage and mass volume due to their non-volatile memory technology. Thus, growing adoption of cloud technology and SSDs in data centers is likely to boost market growth. Demand for mega centers is also expected to increase in industries, such as BFSI and IT services, due to rapid digitization. Enterprises are increasingly shifting from on-premises data centers to cloud platform, which has led to a rise in cloud storage. The cloud platform can be combined with existing on
premises infrastructure. This flexibility is also expected to increase the demand for SSD in cloud computing platform.
However, high cost of these drives than HDDs can act as a challenge for the market.
SSDs are of two types, including internal and external. The internal drives offer better performance than external drives and can be installed in the devices, such as laptop and tablets. However, demand for external drives is increasing due to their better portability and compatibility with systems or devices through USB or FireWire.
North America is one of the largest regional markets due to high adoption of the product and presence of leading manufacturers. Asia Pacific is likely to exhibit phenomenal growth in the years to come attributed to development of next-generation connected devices, rising budget for IT, increasing number of data centers, and requirement of high-capacity storage devices. High adoption of cloud platform, growth of big data, and high penetration of smartphones and laptops is likely to boost regional growth. China and India are expected to support regional growth due to high adoption of cloud services and rising number of data centers.
South America, and Middle East and Africa are expected to expand significantly in the coming years on account of increasing use of laptops and smartphones embedded with SSDs.
Some of the leading companies operating in the solid state drive market are Micron Technology, Inc.; Intel Corporation; Seagate Technology PLC; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; and Pure Storage, Inc.
For instance, Samsung Electronics, announced that it has started mass production of the largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD called the PM1643. It can be used in next-generation enterprise storage systems. It is based on V-NAND technology with 64-layer, 3-bit 512-gigabit (Gb) chips, and the 30.72 terabyte (TB) drive. The product is developed by combining 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprised 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. These super-dense 1TB packages allow for about 5,700 5-gigabyte (GB), full HD movie files to be stored within a 2.5-inch storage device.
Similarly, Kingston Digital, Inc. announced that it is shipping the UV500 family line of SSD products. UV500 is available in different form factors, with 3D NAND-enabled SSD featuring full-disk encryption. The product is driven by the Marvell 88SS1074 controller and combined with 3D NAND Flash. It offers read/write speeds of up to 520MB/s and 500MB/s, making it 10x faster than a 7200RPM hard drive.
