Not really a surprize but solid state drives sales performed remarkably well during 2009, reaching an annual growth of 14%. More specifically, over 11 million units were sold during last year and IDC predicts that shipments will continue to increase.

Pricing was one of the main factors in this marketing performance. The slowdown of IT spending over the past 18 months has led to production cutbacks in NAND semiconductors, slowing overall price reductions for SSDs. Still, in the long term, NAND memory and SSDs will reach lower price points as sales improve. This will make such storage solutions popular in certain storage segments, especially PCs.

IDC estimates that HDDs will lose ground in front of solid state drives, especially when implemented in notebooks and mininotebooks. This is expected because SSDs will not only have competitive price points and storage capacities, but also a better performance. They have better access times, a lower power consumption and an overall better performance.

According to IDC, SSDs will also be quite well suited for data-center environments, "where there is a premium on high performance." The largest market opportunity, however, remains that of personal computers. Overall, shipments are expected to achieve a compound annual growth (CAGR) rate of 54% over the 2008-2013 period. SSD adoption is expected to see tangible growth during 2010.