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LSI's CEO sees single digit SSD penetration

posted on 09 June 2008 11:27

Sanguine on SSD for now but LSI will be a player

LSI's CEO sees only single digit SSD penetration of the storage market over the next few years.

Digitimes has an interview with Abhi Talwalkar, LSI's CEO, in which he talks about many things. His SSD (Solid State Disk) comments strike an informed and revealing note.

Notebooks are growing faster than desktops and SSD's reliability is suited to notebook use. As capacities grow than LSI can bring its IP to bear. But there will be a price premium and this will restrict SSD penetration to single digit percentage levels of the notebook storage market.

Talwalkar says LSI's signal processing skills and signal extraction from noise will be relevant. In the enterprise SSD space Talwalkar thinks penetration will be at the same single digit level and LSI will have a role to play at the controller level. LSI has product technologies for the entire data path such as SAS interfaces to SSDs and RAID

He thinks that some 50-75 million SSD will ship in 2012 compared to some 600 million HDDs. The predominant suppliers could include Seagate, Intel, Micron and Samsung. But storage OEMs could participate in supplying finished SSDs by buying LSI controllers and flash chips from foundries.

Talwalkar thinks that such storage OEMS might find it hard going unless they make industry-standard SSDs which anybody can use, much as HDD makers make standard format and interconnect HDDs today. That suits users better.

Read more here.