“Toshiba Semiconductor Company’s President Shozo Saito took the platform at the seminar hosted by IDEMA Japan and delivered a speech on future prospects of NAND flash memory and SSD (solid state drives) April 18, 2008. In the lecture, he forecast that 25% of all notebook PCs will be equipped with an SSD in 2011,” Mami Akasaka reports for Tech-On!
“Toshiba’s flash memory business basically aims at enhancing production capacity and reducing costs through miniaturization and maltivaluing. Expecting the NAND flash memory market to rapidly expand 133% every year on average from 2006 through 2010, Toshiba plans to fortify its production capacity even faster than that, it said,” Akasaka reports.
“Toshiba is planning to extend its SSD lineup, which currently ranges from 32 to 128 Gbytes, up to 512 Gbytes in the future. Saito is considering the compartmentalization of SSDs for 512 Gbytes or less and HDDs for more in the market for memories used in notebook PCs. He also predicted products with built-in SSD to account for 10% of all notebook PCs in 2010 and 25% in 2011,” Akasaka reports.
“Saito also stated SSD’s pricing disadvantage compared with HDDs can also be gradually reduced. According to Toshiba’s estimates, unit price of NAND flash memory per 1 Gbyte is currently 2.9 and 6.4 times that of 1.8- and 2.5-inch HDD, respectively,” Akasaka reports. “If the NAND price is lowered 50% every year from now on, however, the price gaps will be shrunk to 1.4 and 3.2 times the price of 1.8- and 2.5-inch HDD, respectively, he said.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]