Why SSDs will dominate mobile PC storage by 2018

Trends in SSD pricing and laptop sales are all pointing in the same direction. Mark Hachman reports

f current pricing trends continue, the conventional laptop hard drive could die by 2018, replaced with fast, slim, and increasingly cheaper SSDs. These transfer data faster and with less latency than hard drives, run silently and consume less power. But they’ve traditionally been priced several orders of magnitude higher than a hard drive of the same capacity, limiting their use to higher-end PCs.

Quietly, however, that’s changing. The flash vendors designing the chips used within SSDs have aggressively introduced technology that continues to lower their cost. Meanwhile, hard-drive vendors have spent the past 60 years whittling pound after pound from the cost of a hard drive, but face slowing price declines that should allow SSDs to catch up.

Hard drives certainly aren’t going away – especially in desktop PCs, servers, and in devices such as DVRs. But in notebook PCs? “Let’s be honest,” argues Bob O’Donnell, principal at TECHnalysis Research. “[Hard

Idrives] are obviously a technology that will have run its course at some point.”

SSD price declines pressure hard drives, alter PCs

Right now, SSDs aren’t anywhere close to the same price as a hard drive: on a poundsper-gigabyte basis, SSDs are six times the price of a comparable hard drive, according to Taiwan’s TrendForce. Over time, however, the firm’s data predicts that SSD prices will plunge precipitously, putting them on a level with hard drives, whose pricing has remained unchanged. At that point, SSD’s other advantages should give it the edge.

Alex Chen, the senior manager in the memory division for TrendForce, writes in an email that he believes the price per gigabyte for hard drives and SSDs will be “very close by 2018 to 2020.”

Extrapolating the current price trend puts the crossing point at four pence per gigabyte. Variances in the forecast model could put that as early as mid-2017, or as late as early 2019.

Separate data compiled by Objective Analysis, which tracks the flash market, is more pessimistic, putting SSD prices at four pence per gigabyte barrier in 2019. (Note: the opposite graph includes forecasts from both TrendForce as well as Objective Analysis; the dotted lines indicate our own extension of that data, using Microsoft Excel’s forecasting tool. The key

Right now, SSDs aren’t anywhere close to the same price as a hard drive: on a pounds-per-gigabyte basis, SSDs are six times the price of a comparable hard drive