Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Report: Solid State Drives To Challenge Hard Drives

Scottsdale, Arizona-based In-Stat, an industry analysis and research firm, is reporting this week that solid state hard drives have the potential to dethrone hard disk drives as the top choice for laptop storage. The research, which was released yesterday, found that the market share of solid state disk in mobile computers could reach 50 percent by 2013. Flash memory-based, solid state disks use memory instead of moving spindles to store data. Traditionally, flash memory has been too expensive to replace hard disk drives, however, In-Stat found that drive capacities are now far exceeding user's need. That trend led In-Stat to predict that SSDs have the potential to dethrone HDD storage within 10 years. In-Stat found in its surveys that respondents also found that the power savings is the most important benefit of solid state disks. The research was released as part of In-Stat's "Flash-Based SSDs in Mobile Computing: Contender or Pretender?" report, which was drawn from data collected in April 2006.