SSD market gains from Ultrabooks, tablets in 1Q13

Due to the increased usage in ultrathin/Ultrabook PCs as well as in PC tablets, solid-state drives (SSD) in Q1 got a huge boost. SSD shipments approached 5.9 million units from January to March this year according to IHS. This total was up more than threefold from 1.9 million units during the same three-month period in the first quarter of 2012. SSDs made significant growth in the PC tablet space where shipments hit 1.6 million units, surging by a factor of three from just 542,000 units.

SSD shipments actually increased in virtually every segment where these electronic disks with no moving mechanical parts are used. SSD deployment rose not only in the enterprise segment governing business, but also staged strong gains in the various non-enterprise fields covering desktop PCs, notebook PCs and the industrial market for applications such as aerospace, automotive and medical electronics.

All told, SSD shipments in Q1 amounted to 11.5 million units, up 92 per cent from six million during the same time a year ago. The shipments include stand-alone SSDs, as well as the NAND flash component—also known as a cache SSD—used together with a separate hard disc drive to make up another SSD-based storage mechanism.

"The SSD market enjoyed strong results in the first quarter as both the consumer and enterprise markets ramped up their utilisation of machines that made use of the drives," said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. "Most notably, SSD attach rates climbed in ultrathin/Ultrabook PCs where SSDs are the de facto storage medium, and also in PC tablets where productivity options differentiate them from media tablets."

Meanwhile, the hard disc drive (HDD) market enjoyed some success of its own via the enterprise segment. Shipments here amounted to 16 million units, up from 14.9 million in 1Q12.

HDD enterprise demand is expected to continue growing because of the exploding use of data among consumers, especially in music, video and social networking. Consumers' needs, in turn, will necessitate cost-effective storage solutions on the part of data centres and cloud servers that store and serve up the data. HDDs are still considerably less expensive than SSDs, so their use remains assured despite uneven or dwindling market results at times.