Driven by sharp price falls for NAND flash chips, global shipments of SSDs are estimated to surge 20-25% in 2019 from 200 million units seen in 2018, and PCIe SSDs are expected to emerge as a new mainstream offering by the end of 2019 with a market share of 50% on a par with SATA SSDs, according to industry sources.

The sources said that SSDs are now available with minimum capacity of 256GB following significant improvements in 3D NAND flash process and yield rates, and 480GB SSDs are rising as a consumer market mainstream in 2019.

Apacer Technology president CK Chang said that with better performance, consumer PCIe SSDs will gradually replace SATA SSDs. He continued that PCIe SSDs will soon also be mass adopted for data storage at industrial control systems and datacenters.

Market sources said that unit price for 512GB PCIe SSD has fallen by11% sequentially to US$55 in the first quarter of 2019, compared to a corresponding price drop of 9% for SATA SSD, with price gap between the two types of SSD continuing to narrow from 30% seen in 2018.

The sources continued that current average unit price for 512GB SSDs has declined to the same level for 256 GB SSDs registered one year earlier, and larger price falls for SSDs ranging in capacity from 512GB to 1TB are expected in the remainder of 2019.

Falling average selling prices for consumer Gen 3.0x2 PCIe SSDs fitted in notebooks will accelerate the adoption of such SSDs by OEMs. This, coupled with demand for ever-higher storage capacity and speed to support cloud computing, 5G and autonomous driving applications, will further stimulate market demand for PCIe SSDs and inspire brand vendors to gear up production of such lucrative storage devices and related chips, the sources indicated.

For instance, Taiwan-based IC designers Silicon Motion Technology, Phison Electronics, and Silicon Integrated Systems are racing to roll out enhanced version of PCI SSD controller chips, while major brand vendors such as Kingston Technology, Adata Technology, Transcend Information, Seagate and Micron have also listed PCIe SSDs as their mainstream product lines.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved