Kingston states the obvious, lower NAND price will lead to cheaper SSDs

Sometimes technology companies really states the obvious and Kingston has now gone on record to say that it expects SSD drive adoption to take off significantly towards the second half of next year. The reason why you ask? Well, by then NAND flash is expected to have come down in cost to about US$1 per 1GB, in other words, SSDs will be cheaper than they are now which will lead to a bigger consumer uptake.

Maybe we're being a little bit harsh here, but it doesn't take a genius to figure this out. Nathan Su, Kingston's flash memory sale director is the person in question that's been talking to Digitimes about the future of Kingston's SSD products and the fact that the company is expecting a large uptake of SSDs next year. The current hard drive situation with the flooding in Thailand was also mentioned, but by the second half of 2012 we're hoping that problem will have been solved.

One of the reasons for the lower cost NAND flash is a move to sub 20nm manufacturing processes which are expected to happen next year. What isn't mentioned though is that some manufacturers are switching to TLC NAND flash and combined with the sub 20nm manufacturing process this will lead to shorter NAND flash life. Even so, it's expected that TLC NAND flash should last about 5 years or so, even with fairly large amounts of data being written to it on a daily basis. No details of upcoming SSD products were revealed, but Kingston is apparently focusing on entry-level products as well as it mid-range products for next year, hopefully products that will be better than its current entry-level which aren't exactly cost competitive as we mentioned a little while ago.