The first quarter of 2013 saw an explosive growth in SSD shipments

The market-research firm IHS reports that there was an explosive growth in SSD shipments in the first quarter of 2013 because of SSDs widely used in notebooks and hybrid PC tablets. The SSD shipments are three times more than the same period in 2012.

The SSD shipments for notebooks and tablets in the first quarter are up to 11.5 million, while the real number is obviously larger, because it does not include the retail market’s shipments.

   IHS analyst Fang Zhang said, “SSD attach rates climbed in Ultrabook PCs where SSDs are the de facto storage medium,” “and also in PC tablets where productivity options differentiate them from media tablets.”

  However, the shipments of HDDs dropped to 135.7 million in the first quarter, falling seven percent. It was about 145.5 million units in the same period of 2012. IHS attributes the reason to the weak market of PCs. The situation is not the same with enterprise HDDs, where quarterly shipments increased from 14.9 million units to 16.0 million units.

From the market research we can see that Samsung, Intel, SanDisk, Seagate, and Hitachi are the big winners in the SSD market. Western Digital continues to top its first position in the hard disk market for the fourth year, beating out Seagate and Hitachi.

Now Seagate begins to pay attention to SSD market, which it neglected when SSD first came to us. And I believe that as the cost been cut down, the capacity and durability increased, SSD will replace HDD some day.

The first quarter of 2013 saw an explosive growth in SSD shipments