Summary
Flash SSDs are poised to replace HDDs in the notebook PC market provided users want them to. If that happens it will be a big plus for SSD makers like SanDisk, Samsung, Toshiba, Intel, Micron, STEC, SuperTalent, SMART Modular, and many other firms. It will meanwhile serve to harm Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, another part of Toshiba, and Fujitsu. The PC OEMs: Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, and many others will be observers of this battle, as they can switch from one side to the other easily without any harm to themselves.
Analysis
There is a prevalent piece of lore that gives several reasons why SSDs will replace HDDs in the near future: Faster boot-up time, resistance to shock, quieter operation, and so forth. While this all sounds very reasonable, customers have not warmed up to this technology, and there is nothing in the works today that should cause a radical shift in this behavior. SSDs offer little that the notebook user wants in return for a significantly higher price than their HDD counterparts. Some SSD advocates project that the price gap between HDD and SSD will close, pointing to NAND flash's recent collapse, but that collapse has occurred at an unsustainable rate, and will be corrected soon. Other SSD evangelists claim that users, at least users of enterprise notebooks, have no need for all the storage that a high-capacity HDD has to offer. This has always been true, but it has never stopped purchasers' continued migration to ever-increasing HDD capacities. We explore this entire phenomenon in the Objective Analysis report: "The Solid State Disk Market: A Rigorous Look", available at www.Objective-Analysis.com/Reports. Objective Analysis' forecast for the SSD market into notebook PCs has always been the most pessimistic in the market, and whenever it has been wrong it has been too high. We expect for significant time to elapse before this situation changes.
