It looks like a number of smaller SSD manufacturers will exit the market as big SSD companies have started to cut down on price thanks to a significant reduction in the price of NAND flash.

Josephine Lien and Jessie Shen from Digitimes quote sources in Taiwan and say that a number of channel retailers which usually sell memory products like memory cards and (USB) flash drives have started to offer SSDs.

This has caused market leaders, such as Kingston Technology, Intel, OCZ and Crucial to lower their price as they apparently intend to squeeze smaller players out, a move that could be interpreted as being oligopolistic.

This comes as the market is moving from SATA2 to SATA3 interface with the price difference between the two shrinking. This could drive the market to adopt bigger capacities (between 128GB and 256GB) instead of the smaller ones (between 32GB and 64GB).

We've also noticed a small but noticeable trend from manufacturers who are offering solid state drives as primary storage and complemented by traditional hard disk drives.

Given the growing popularity of cloud computing, it wouldn't be surprising to see the desktop-based "ultrabooks" without a keyboard or monitor but with a small SSD and a low power processor.

Source : Digitimes