Is Solid State Drive (SSD) usage in netbooks set to decline next year? That’s what some are saying. DRAMeXchange is forecasting that netbooks shipping with SSDs this year has dropped and will fall even further next year.
Their research indicates that in the first quarter of this year, around 70% of netbooks shipped with SSDs. The next quarter saw 66%, and last quarter saw 30%, with a prediction of 20% this quarter and down into single digits within 12 months.
I can understand some of that – the early netbooks had pretty low storage – in the 4GB range. Once Windows XP was introduced into the equation, the situation was pretty bad until Acer and MSI (and Asus) began shipping a lot of machines with 120GB and then 160GB conventional hard drives. Many people were hesitant to drop down to the 4GB or 8GB range of storage, and the cost to go above that versus conventional drives was not going to help things.
I happen to think that as SSD prices drop and performance goes up, you’ll see people buying 3rd-party SSDs to stick in their netbooks. You get a slight boost in battery life, a boost in overall performance (depending on the OS) and more importantly, you get a netbook without any moving parts (outside of the cooling fan(s)).
Read: Register Hardware