NAND memory and solid-state drives’ average selling prices have been declining in recent quarters as a result of weak demand and excess supply. However, their unit and dollar sales are anticipated to increase as more applications adopt solid-state drives. Yole Group forecasts that in 2028, five years from now, SSD sales will reach $67 billion (via StorageNewsletter).

According to Yole, the total solid-state drives market is anticipated to increase from $29 billion and 352 million units in 2022 to $67 billion and 472 million units in 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of roughly 15% between those two years.

About 55 million of the 352 million solid-state drives sold in 2022 will be enterprise drives, with the remainder being client SSDs.

PCIe SSDs made up the majority of the enterprise SSD shipments in 2022—roughly 55% or 30 million units. By 2028, it is predicted that this percentage will rise to roughly 71%, or 79 million units. It is anticipated that the percentage of PCIe client SSDs will increase from approximately 85% in 2021 to approximately 96% in 2028, or 252 million units and 347 million units, respectively.

Additionally, enterprise drives will adopt new PCIe interfaces quicker than their client-side counterparts. Yole predicts that only 12% of client drives will use a PCIe 5.0 bus in 2028, despite the fact that 69% of enterprise-grade solid-state drives will do so. In terms of PCIe 6.0 SSDs, it is anticipated that they will control 16% of the market for datacenter drives by 2028, but that their share of the client SSD market will be a meagre 3%.

In terms of units, solid-state drives sales decreased from $34 billion in 2021 to $29 billion in 2022, a 14% year-over-year decline; this corresponded to about 352 million units, down from over 400 million units in 2021. Yole Group, however, thinks that this sudden decline was a one-time occurrence.

However, given the continued slow depletion of inventory and the weak economy, which has resulted in a significant oversupply, the company does not exactly strive to provide a more or less precise dollar or unit sales outlook for 2023.

Not all solid-state drives vendors are prepared to profit equally from the market expansion. According to Yole, demand for client SSD products will be weak in the years to come, whereas enterprise SSD growth will be fueled by “low-latency storage needs of advanced workloads” in the datacenter market.

Low-latency solid-state storage applications are essential for fashionable applications like generative artificial intelligence, but the market research firm does not specify which workloads it refers to.

NAND integrated device manufacturers (IDMs), which create their own memory, NAND controllers, and drives, and third-party solid-state drives producers, who purchase flash memory from IDMs and controllers from third parties to create their drives, are the two main categories of SSD suppliers, according to Yole Group.

In the meantime, manufacturers of both varieties of SSD frequently purchase controllers from firms like Silicon Motion, Phison, and Marvell. Large cloud datacenter operators frequently create their own storage devices, but they still purchase memory and/or controllers from outside vendors.

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