At the recent Samsung Global SSD Summit 2016 in Seoul Korea, Samsung showed off new products like the 960 PRO/EVO but they also made some predictions about the future of the solid state market over the next few years.
Tom’s Hardware has a great overview of the presentation. Most of it is the typical talk about how SSDs are a rapidly growing market, cost per GB of capacity is dropping, larger capacity drives are getting more popular as they get cheaper, SSDs are pushing out hard drives in the mobile and enterprise markets, and so on. While it’s nice to see some numbers and extrapolations, none of that is particularly surprising.
This slide got my attention though, Samsung sold 33 million NVMe drives this year compared to 56 million SATA drives and they think that shipments of NVMe drives will surpass traditional SATA SSDs as early as next year! Then by 2018 they’re predicting that NVMe drives will outsell SATA drives by over 4 to 1!
This is great news for SFF enthusiasts because while Samsung uses the 2.5″ U.2 and PCIe Add-In Card form factors in their enterprise lines, they exclusively use the M.2 form factor for their consumer NVMe drives. As the market for these high performance drives expands, they may branch out into those form factor for the consumer line as well, but as capacity increases, prices drop, and thermal throttling is addressed, I’m pretty confident that M.2 will continue to be the preferred format going forward.
As they’re the largest SSD manufacturer, I’m excited that Samsung sees such a bright future for NVMe drives, and by extension, the M.2 form factor for storage.
Thoughts? Discuss them here.
