Consumer SSD adoption challenges

Getting to a market penetration in Consumer has not reached 50% yet ... it will close at 30% or less in 2015. Getting there has a number of challenges... some can be addressed ... others are more challenging

• SSDs cost more than HDDs.
• If we go with the cheapest SSD known to man and we use rack rate pricing for HDD, SSDs are 5x more expensive. it drops to 3x by 2018
• If we take minimum cost to PC ODM, a 240GB SSD would cost >$50. A 500GB HDD is $23. The difference is more than than the total OEM Profit margin on a notebook PC
• ODMs refuse to add 50c to a BOM ... let alone $20+
• Consumers don't know impact of SSDs on performance. Actually they don't judge PCs on amount of storage in GBs... not good for SSDs
• SSDs are not instant on. Its nice to say SSDs are 50 times faster than HDDs. In reality they boot 50% faster and they load applications 50% faster ... which might not be noticeable in most consumer uses
• There is no competition to have fastest storage in notebooks. Apple needs SSDs to keep its high performance $1000+ price point lead. Intel needs SSDs to compete in the same market. The average notebook is $500 and is not a major storage performance competition

There is hope:

• Corporate PCs are a major market and low density, high speed SSDs withe fast backups are required
• A competition could come out with either Lenovo, Acer, Dell, etc fully converting to SSD to push the market.  
• a 2:1 or Chromebook or alternative Cloud/small fast storage market would drive SSD sales up. a 128G SSD + 128GB cloud would be a perfect $500 convertable
• DRAM faces similar challenges. But the difference is that Intel pushes for Faster DRAM  and marketing pushes for it as well. and eventually, the price of the new memory matches the slower memory which causes sales tipping point. Intel could force people to use PCIe SSD on future chipsets.

Until then, combinations of HDD/SSD or HDD alone will be most of the PCs sold.

#storagevisions, #CES2016

Mark Webb, mark@mkwventures.com