Earlier in the week, Western Digital’s CEO John Coyne was quoted in the SSD Review as saying that he did not believe that SSDs would play a large role in Ultrabooks. Specifically, he reportedly said:
“I expect ultrabooks to have traditional hard drives, hybrid hard drives and SSDs. We think that the SSD penetration profile will be in very low single digits in a mature ultrabook environment. We see an emerging position for hybrids a little early to develop a view on exactly what percentage of penetration, but we see hybrids as a very compelling alternative on the performance side to solid-state on bang for the buck. We anticipate that in large capacity environments, traditional hard drives will continue to be the compelling solution.”
This remark was widely panned as kicking, er sand, on SSD sales for the coming year.
For a different perspective, we now turn to SanDisk, which conducted an earnings call with analysts yesterday. On this call, EETimes reports that SanDisk CFO Judy Bruner said:
“As the SSD business grows as a percentage of our mix, particularly in the enterprise segment, we believe seasonality will be less pronounced.”
So now we turn to the wisdom of crowds. The Denali Memory Report is giving you a chance to express your optimism (or pessimism) about the chances for SSD sales this year. Please take the poll:
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