SSD Shipments Continue Upward Surge

With the decline in the PC market, one of the few bright spots has been SSDs. Unlike hard disk drive shipments which have followed the PC market down, SSDs are bucking the trend and continuing to grow. According to industry analysts, SSD shipments have grown by over 32% compared to the same time last year and by 4% compared to last quarter. given that Q1 usually tends to be slower, this is great news for the SSD market.

Over Q1 2016, around 30.777 million SSDs were sold. The top sellers were Samsung, SanDisk, Lite-On, Kingston, and Intel in that order. While there were changes in relative marketshare, all SSD makers managed to ship more drives. SATA drives continue to dominate the market but I believe we’ll start seeing PCie, M.2, and U.2 drives become more common as SSDs push their performance. Enterprise SSDs saw even greater gains as data centres move to faster storage tech.

With NAND prices expected to fall even more with the arrival of more 3D NAND, we’ll likely see cheaper and larger SSDs to come. While it’s still a ways off, we may soon see SSDs offer not only performance but competitive capacities and pricing relative to hard disk drives.