Demand soars for SSD drives

The market for solid state drives (SSD) is booming – and some vendors have told PCR that demand is starting to outstrip supply.
Demand for the hard drives is so high that certain manufacturers such as Kingston are having to up their production schedules.
Global demand for SSDs is expected to grow by 75 per cent this year to 78 million units, according to brokers Nomura. PCR has learnt that others believe the demand could drum up the price of SSDs in the latter half of the year.
“Kingston has seen a huge jump in demand for SSDs this year in the consumer, corporate and data centre markets,” said Kingston UK sales account manager Jim Knee.
“As demand has risen, we have increased our production of drives in all market sectors. Fortunately for Kingston, we have great relationships with a number of NAND memory suppliers and can therefore currently meet demand with high quality chips.
“For any SSD producer who relies on a single source of NAND supply, it can be really tough to keep up and secure reliable deliveries.”
Kingston says it will continue to release products to support these markets, focusing on reduced NAND chip sizes, improved controller technology and increased capacity. It’s confident about the business going ahead, too.
“We are very optimistic about the growth in all SSD markets,” added Knee. “It has been claimed many times that the market has reached a turning point for SSDs. Whilst this claim is hard to quantify, we are certainly seeing a very large upswing in demand for SSDs.”

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