As many storage companies have recently released their CQ1 ‘16 results, it is very clear – SSDs are winning the race! Even as we witnessed a drastic decline in the client PC market in Q1 (almost -15% Q-Q), client SSDs are anticipated to show yet another increase in unit shipments (sorry HDDs). Even with the declining notebook market, people want their SSDs. Remember, CQ1 ‘16 posted the lowest HDD shipment number since CQ2 ‘06, with this current quarter estimated to be below 100M units.
For enterprise SSDs, when all the numbers are added up, all three segments will most likely show growth yet again. Hyperscale demand for SATA SSDs continues to show solid growth, and SAS SSDs going to storage networking companies continued to grow despite the woes of the traditional enterprise storage market (sorry 10K & 15K HDDs). And lastly comes PCIe, still the lowest unit share of all three, but still displaying strong growth with 1CQ16 being no different.
One thing remains a bright spot for HDDs – let’s go sell as many of those nearline HDDs as we can. Anyone who has children knows that the cloud will need all the storage capacity possible to store all of those videos and photos kids spend 18+ hours of the day taking and posting.
For additional details on either the HDD or SSD industry and CQ1 ‘16 results, TRENDFOCUS will be releasing our quarterly updates next week.