According to a new report by TrendForce division DRAMeXchange, most laptops that will be sold in 2018 will come equipped with solid state drives, or SSDs, instead of hard disk drives, or HDDs.
The first HDD was commercialized by IBM back in 1956, and 60 years after, they remain a fixture in the computer industry. However, the rotating discs found in HDDs are not compatible with smaller devices such as smartphones and memory cards. These devices use memory chips called flash, with banks of flash memory making up the SSDs that are increasingly being used for desktop and laptop computers.
According to the DRAMeXchange report, the price of SSDs in the market for original equipment manufacturers of computers has stabilized for the first time in a year. While there are still signs that supply of SSDs will be tight in the second half of 2016, the TrendForce division maintains its prediction that the adoption rate of SSDs among notebooks will reach 33 percent this year.
In addition, TrendForce expects the adoption rate to reach 44 percent by 2017 and will exceed majority with 56 percent by 2018. The big question, however, is whether this is a trend that will be beneficial or detrimental to consumers who will purchase laptops in the future.
HDDs continue to have certain advantages over SSDs, with the first and foremost one being its cheaper price for bigger amounts of storage. In addition, they last longer as data is overwritten multiple times. Companies usually buy HDDs in bulk for cloud-computing purposes such as establishing a backup system or document editing.
However, SSDs perform much faster compared to HDDs in booting up laptops, loading apps and storing files. In an industry where speed is becoming more relevant, SSDs are gaining favor among consumers and businesses.
In addition, the price of SSDs have dropped significantly each year for the past four years, and by next year, their price tag is expected to be just over 11 cents per gigabyte compared to HDDs. The prices of SSDs are expected to drop, but the prices of HDDs do not look like they will still be decreasing.
There has been a lot of development in SSD technology. Earlier in the month, Seagate unveiled a 60 TB SSD that is the biggest SSD in the world so far and meant to be used by enterprise data centers. Last month, Samsung announced the 4 TB 850 EVO SSD meant for consumers, with a price tag of $1,499.99.
