Solid-state drives meet the turning point

Analysis agency iSuppli recently released a report saying that the price of NAND flash memory will return to the key point of 1 US dollar per GB at the end of this year, and the price of SSDs will drop accordingly, ushering in a new opportunity for challenging mechanical hard disks.

The report estimates that the price of 3-bit-per-cell (TLC) NAND flash memory will average around US$1.2 per GB in the fourth quarter of this year, and will drop to the one-dollar key point at the beginning of next year. Compared to TLC flash memory of $1.8 per gigabyte in early 2010 and 2-bit-per-cell (MLC) flash memory of around $2.05 per gigabyte, this drop has been considerable. If the dollar falls below the one-dollar mark early next year, it will be the first time that flash memory prices have returned to this critical price point since the fourth quarter of 2008.

Analyst Michael Yang said that when flash memory first fell below the one-dollar mark at the end of 2008, it was the first time that SSDs had been popularized and used to challenge traditional mechanical hard drives. However, due to the recovery of prices caused by strong demand and capacity constraints in the following period, this wave of SSD popularization only scratched the field of large-scale data center servers and did not affect the mainstream commercial and home PC markets.

When the flash memory returns to the US dollar price level again by the end of this year at the beginning of next year, it is expected that the SSD will get a second chance for popularity due to the price drop. However, in the past two years, HDD mechanical hard drives have regained a lot of strength by relying on greater capacity and lower prices. SSDs are more difficult to challenge HDDs than they were two years ago. The report estimates that by 2012, the price per gigabyte of flash memory will reach around US$0.4. By that time, the price of a 100GB solid state drive will drop to around US$50, which will really impact the mainstream HDD drive status.