Taipei (Taiwan) – DRAMeXchange has revised its Flash bit growth forecast once again, from 108.2% in September to only 81%, which is less than half the growth rate the sector posted just two years ago. The market research firm said that the new number reflects a declining demand of consumer electronics.

NAND flash manufacturers are already in trouble and it seems that 2009 will only get worse. The new bit growth expectation is still high at 81%, but behind the 175% in 2006, 151% in 2007 and 121% in this year. And while the absolute number of bit growth will be stronger next year than it was in 2008, the greater capacity of flash chips indicates that actual shipments of flash devices may not grow at all are even decline.

According to DRAMeXchange, about 28.2 billion 1 Gb flash units were shipped during 2008, up from 12.7 billion in 2007. The 2009 forecast estimates shipments at 52.0 billion 1 Gb units – translating to an 81% bit growth rate. However, due to increased competitive pressure, flash storage capacity is generally expected to at least double next year, which could mean that actual chip shipments may decline.

The primary reasons for this scenario is the cellphone industry which is expected to post decline in shipments for 2008. Demand for digital cameras, MP3 players and USB memory sticks is still on the rise, but has slowed as well, according to DRAMeXchange. Most interestingly, the market research firm found that solid state disk drives are not selling as well as anticipated: “The short term demand mainly comes from the industrial market and the outcome in the low cost PC market is actually lower than expected, which was due to price and reliability issues,” the company said.  
 
Most notebook makers PC still are still focused on the traditional hard drive as its major storage device. “The penetration rate of SSD in the low cost PC market will be lower than 10% in 2009,” DRAMeXchange stated.

There is still an oversupply of flash memory in the market, which will cause manufacturers to reduce their wafer production by about 10% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2009. According to DRAMeXchange, flash companies will also adjust their product mix, lowering the unprofitable portion of the NAND flash related production and shifting to more profitable devices such as SSDs.  

when SSD's compete more

Dec 31, 2008 13:01     

I think SSD's will compete more with traditional hard drives when their price is comparable with them; Lower prices, higher appeal.
TomLeeM/BigWarpGuy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +10

cheep SSDs sooner?

Dec 31, 2008 13:28     

if USB Memory, CF, and Camera Memory falls off in 2009, does that mean that we can see Cheap SSDs sooner? And if so, is that good?
jdavid.net report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

massive typo there in the headline! "too slow"

Dec 31, 2008 14:06     

SSD is a great technology but it needs to get more GB/$ . The consumers chose IDE over SCSI because of the higher GB/$ and it seems to be the same for SSD
chewbie report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2

Here's why

Dec 31, 2008 18:18     

SSD's are still this far down the road an unproven technology. I hear reports and read reviews of people saying their SSD's get progressively slower with age. While price is a factor, even for the gaming segment which doesn't care so much about $$$, SSD's are a "sometime in the future" technology.
Anonymous report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -1

Duh

Dec 31, 2008 21:10     

because a regular hard drive is cheaper and theses companies figure everyone wants to jump on the new and improved but hey we don't get to see a big speed improvement over the raptors and the good high speed solid state memory still cost to much to be commercially viable to push to consumers.
kdmc1 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

too slow, too expensive

Jan 01, 2009 00:40     

SSDs are still too slow or too expensive. You can get faster, but pay a lot. You can get cheap, but really slow. Until they are both fast and cheap... I'll stick to HD technology.
Narg report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

Hungry for SSD

Jan 01, 2009 10:32     

I are hungry for a RAID 0 of fast SSD disks, but today offer are too slow, or too expensive. I would settle for a pair of intel SSD 64 Gb if the price matches 1Tb of Hard disk. "penetration rate of SSD in the low cost PC market" That only can be a joke ¿low cost?
mm report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -1

Performance/Price

Jan 01, 2009 11:38     

Lets face it, until recently SSDs still didn't offer a significant advantage in speed without spending ludicrous amounts of money in the process, while only having a fraction of the capacity of a hard drive. The newer models coming out now seem to be offering much more compelling performance for laptops within a reasonable price range. For desktops, there is still little reason to switch to SSDs when the current 1TB hard drives offer almost the same performance for a fraction of the cost with many times the capacity. Until the cost per GB comes down significantly, SSDs will remain firmly in the enthusiast range or only within prestige machines. (PS. I realise netbooks have SSDs too, at low cost, but these usually offer very small capacity and poor performance)

Jo-Mo report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Besides price/performance, better support is needed...

Jan 01, 2009 17:04     

As most stated, until recently, you'd only get either: - very high price with good performance; - "lower price" (still expensive) with poor performance; But there are other problems. The fact that the OS is really HDD oriented doing too much reading and writing to page memory, (auto-)defrag, pre-fetch, index, etc... This wears the SSD's lifespan, so I for one wouldn't like to buy an SSD and have my OS ruining it for the simple reason of not being ready to support SSDs instead of HDDs. Since I, like most, have Windows (XP in my case), it would help a lot to have Microsoft natively support SSDs. Unfortunately, MS's OS's lifespans are working against us: XP is only having it's lifecycle increased very little, but I don't believe it will have SSD support; even Vista might not get to have that; Windows 7 which should arrive this year is the probable candidate to have this support, from the start, even increasing the reason for people to update to the new OS version. So, if this goes as I expect, proper SSD support should arrive later this year, combining that with better pricing, increased sizes (also with decent prices), increasing performance (keeping good pricing), recovering economy... by the end of this year of 2009, the SSDs should be really interesting - going mainstream as primary (boot) or even single disk on computers.

Q report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +4

2nd DUH!!!

Jan 02, 2009 11:22     

Too expensive and not fast and big enough! like everyone says, sata2 is still too slow, quit screwing around and get SATA3 out NOW dangit!!!! Not eveyone is made of money.
DUH report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -2

down markt man.

Jan 02, 2009 14:25     

too expensive, to small in storage...and with a market down turn..I can spend the thousand on a much faster computer and other goodies than just a drive...or spend the same amount to buy a raid box and do a raid 5 with 5x 1.5T drives and still got transfer rate similar to a small 150G ssd... plus tons more storage and failsafe.
yo report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

HI THERE HOW YOU CAN SELL 30 BILLION UNITS WITH ONL...

Feb 14, 2009 19:26     

HI THERE HOW YOU CAN SELL 30 BILLION UNITS WITH ONLY 6 BILLION HUMMANS? YOU'RE SELLING 5 FLASH CARDS TO EVERY HUMMAN ON EARTH?
james braselton report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0