Objective Analysis believe SSDs will never reach prices of HDDs
In his presentation at the Flash Memory Summit today, Objective Analysis principal Jim Handy was quite optimistic on the future of the NAND flash memory market; for the near term.
Flash memory market business to remain viable until 2011
Handy pointed to current product shortages and price stability that will probably last until 2010-2011 due to growing demand combined with production and capital investments cutbacks; which is music to the ears for the 5 Flash memory makers left (Hynix, Micron, Samsung, Sandisk, Toshiba) in the market which are still recovering from their deep losses in 2008.
Looking at SSDs, Handy believes this market is ripe for consolidation; which will go from the 171+ Flash-based drive makers of today to just a handful. “Remember that there were 282 companies that used to make disk drives before the market consolidates to about 5 today,” recalls DISK/TREND founder Jim Porter.
Handy also expects SSDs to stay weak in the PC market due to higher costs compare to hard-disk drives and the upcoming launch of Braidwood, the codename for Intel’s update of its Turbo Memory technology, a flash-based caching technology that should improve disk access performance which is scheduled to be featured on mainstream motherboards in 2010.
To add insult to injury, Handy doesn’t see a price crossover between SSDs and HDDs… actually this may never happen.
Here’s a video excerpt of Handy’s presentation:
