Kingston: SSDs to Displace Mechanical HDDs in Second Half of 2012

Kingston: SSDs to Displace Mechanical HDDs in Second Half of 2012

Is SSD (solid-state drive) finally going to displace the spinning hard disk drive (HDD)? According to Kingston, it is, and that's going to take place in the second half of next year.

According to Maximum PC, the California-based flash memory giant believes that by this time next year, you're “likely to choose a solid state drive over a mechanical hard drive”.

Falling prices is cited as one of the primary reasons. According to DigiTimes, Nathan Su, who is the flash memory sales director at Kingston, says that the average price of 1GB of NAND flash memory will probably fall to around US$1. He believes that this coupled with the transition to a 19nm manufacturing process will prove to be the ‘game changer’ in 2012 with regards to SSD adoption.

Another unexpected factor that’s helping the SSD cause is the expected shortage of mechanical hard drives due to the recent floods in Thailand. IHS iSuppli has predicted that global HDD supply will shrink by 30% in the current quarter. Over here in Singapore, we've witnessed jumps in prices for existing stock since the flooding happened.

Source: Maximum PC