Are Hard Disk Drives Facing Extinction?

July 17, 2006 By Ian Bell

A report released today claims that Solid State Drives (SSD) could reach as much as 50% of the mobile PC market by 2013.

You can now buy a 2GB SD memory card for well under 100 dollars, so it should come as no surprise to hear that Solid State Drives (flash based) will eventually be picking up steam in the mobile PC market. Research firm In-Stat says that figure could reach 50% percent of the market by the year 2013. The company surveyed 389 mobile computer users and researched the current trends in Flash development to come to this conclusion.

“The HDD industry has done a phenomenal job of driving areal densities; however, it is clear that there are user segments for which drive capacities far exceed the user’s need,” says Frank Dickson, In-Stat analyst. “When one examines the declining cost trends for Flash, the user’s need for storage and the premium that consumers place on the benefits provided by SSDs, it is easy to see that there will be a clear demand for SSDs.”

In-Stat’s research revealed that people would likely pay a higher price for a more reliable and faster hard drive based on solid-state memory, however power savings topped the consumer wish-list as to why they would want a SSD based PC.

SSD are picking up steam in several markets including mobile phones, media players, thumb drives among others. Samsung announced in May this year that they developed a 16GB solid state drive with power consumption of less than five percent of today’s hard disk drives (HDD).

Showing 5 comments

prashobhkarunakaran at 11:39pm 1st March 2010 Samsung still makes hard disks. Hard disk is definitely the growing and future industry that will help the world. I believe one can see the future by looking inside a hard disk; a clean (and not oily and clunky) machine where electricity has a more important role than the mechanical parts. The only mechanical technology is the bearings and even this will disappear when they suspend the disk holding mechanism in a magnetic field like the electric trains. Hard disk technology has a long way to go, they are already shock resistant enough to be installed in a cell phones which can withstand a human jogging while talking on such a phone. Cars manufacturers are installing it in the latest cars to enable a whole range of things like GPS and movies downloadable from the convenience of your laptop in your home wirelessly to your car's hard disk.
Tim Stevens at 5:07pm 19th July 2006 I agree Prashobh, but if solid state drives get to a point where they can store more than traditional hard drives, then it's a given. This isn't just "flash" memory cards. These are solid state drives that will be faster than SATA.
Prashobh Karunakaran at 9:02pm 18th July 2006 There is no way solid state devices will replace hard disks. No doubt flash memory storage capacity is increasing and prices are going down, but the rate at which the solid state industry in doing this is far less than hard disk industry. We are moving to the graphic world of pictures that tells a thousand words. Pictures and movies are going to be a prime means of communication. Movies are already moving to hard disks as in PVRs. Band widths of communications are increasing at a very high rate with fiber optics to accomodate the movement of graphics. We have put up with the "old fashion" written communication all this time because we did not have an alternative but humans have naturally communicated with pictures and visions since ancient times. Flash memories just cannot handle all these.
Ian Bell and Dan Gaul at 5:53pm 17th July 2006 I think you will see SSD's in cell phones and media players well before they hit the laptop scene. Either way this is great news for us.
Barry at 5:52pm 17th July 2006 Part of me tells me that this could happen well before 2013, especially since Samsung announced a 16GB flash drive already this year. The question is whether the harddrive industry is going to milk what they current have into an astronomically long product lifecycle.

BTW does Samsung still make HDD's anymore? If not, then it would be in their best interested to push this SSD technology.