SSD Growth Forecast in Compute Markets: Enterprise/Datacenter

Datacenter/Enterprise: SSDs provide 30% of units and  15% of capacity sold in 2017. 

Projections for ALL SSDs and applications from a number of outlets are 15-19% unit growth and 15-20% Revenue growth. We have all the details behind those numbers if you want them but some specifics on SSD/HDD ratio on Enterprise/Datacenter

SSD% of total Enterprise HDD+SSD unit sales finished 2017 just around 30%, climbing from 23% in 2016. For 2018 we predict continued growth to 36%.  Due to nearline and Cold storage HDD dominance, SSDs provide <15% of the new capacity sold in the enterprise today. 

Note: SSDs are less than 15% of NEW capacity sold. they are less than 10% of total capacity

By Application:

• SSDs replace mission critical 10K/15K HDDs at a very fast rate as cost per IOPs is equivalent or better. SSDs should replace 90% of this market eventually
• SSDs in server markets are growing steadily in PCIe and SATA applications
• SSDs continue to make little impact in nearline and cold storage applications
• TLC utilization will support SSD growth in all applications

Reasons for methodical increase:

• SSD $/GB Pricing is still 10x HDD Pricing in most enteprise applications
• SSD Prices are dropping but so are HDD prices. no crossover coming
• Anything with $/IOPS Metric is moving to SSD. Anything with $/GB Metric (Nearline/Cold) is staying HDD
• Enterprise customers are slow to move and change configurations. 10K/15K HDDs still sell even though there is limited rationale for using them over SSDs

For details on attach rates, SSD pricing, HDD pricing, and cost assumptions over the next 5 years, contact us!

From WDC presentation 90% of data is still HDD in 2022:

Side note: Optane (p4800x) and Fast NAND applications (Z-NAND and products from WDC/Hynix/Toshiba) will impact server NVMe SSDs sales for fastest applications. The Jury is still out on how much of a premium customers are willing to pay over NAND SSDs. 

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