Plummetting prices drive SSD sales boom
UK market closing in on one million-unit mark on back of 60 per cent growth this year
The UK solid-state drive (SSD) market is set to be worth nearly one million units in 2014 as falling prices and increasing public awareness drive a 60 per cent growth in the market.
According to Futuresource Consulting, UK shipments of SSDs, which unlike hard disk drives (HDDs) contain no moving components, are on course to rise from 589,000 in 2013 to 944,000 this year. Growth hit a blistering 77 per cent in Q3 as 258,000 units shipped.
Samsung, Crucial and Kingston accounted for over 75 per cent of the UK SSD market this year, the analyst said.
Across EMEA as a whole, shipments are expected to grow at the same rate to 8.8 million, Futuresource said, with Q3 sales alone growing by 70 per cent to 2.2 million.
120/128Gb is the most popular capacity, followed by 240/256GB, accounting for almost 70 per cent of sales combined, the analyst said.
"With falling prices and increasing public awareness, we expect SSD to continue to exhibit strong growth across 2015," says Mats Larsson, senior market analyst at Futuresource.
Nick Powling, general manager of products at storage distributor Hammer, said the market for SSDs among system integrator customers is booming as plummetting prices suddenly makes them an affordable option.
"If you go back 12 months, the cost of SSD was almost as much as the overall server," he said. "As the cost has come down, it's allowed people to take advantage of the performance benefits of SSD while maintaining a solution that is affordable to their customers."
Powling added: "On the commercial side, capacity has increased at a far higher rate than HDDs, so people can now buy one or two tb SSDs."
SSD technology intitially gained in popularity outside its traditional industrial stronghold in 2011 as the Thai floods sparked an HDD supply crisis. According to research house IHS Technology, global shipments of SSDs rose 82 per cent in 2013 to 57 million units, while HDD shipments slid seven per cent to 444.4 million units.