Is a price war for solid state disk drives on the horizon?
April 28, 2012 § 1 Comment
A while back, I wrote about the impact of the flooding in Thailand on the price of traditional mechanical disk drives. Since just about every dark cloud has a silver lining, this natural disaster has accelerated the development and maturation of the solid state disk (SSD) market. Naturally, this growing segment has attracted a bunch of new players, and this is a bit unsettling to the established leaders. In response, these vendors appear to be trying a time-tested approach to squash newer and more nimble competitors:
Major SSD firms have initiated price reductions to reflect falling prices for NAND flash chips. The move is also aimed at triggering a price war in the market in an attempt to squeeze out smaller peers, according to industry sources in Taiwan.
From the perspective of cloud computing and Big Data/NoSQL, if an SSD price war does ensue, there’s a very good chance that it will result in further innovations in affordable hosted high-performance databases. In-memory disk drives should also go a long way toward increasing the scalability and predictability of shared cloud-based virtual machine instances.
rdschneider 
[…] were damaged or destroyed, and the price of hard drives rose accordingly. A few weeks ago, I speculated that these tragic events might spur innovation (and price cutting) in the solid-state disk (SSD) […]