Here we have a geeks wet dream. We kinda have hit a plateau with how much SSD drives can store - and how much people are willing to pay for that storage. With 64GB costing about $1,000 its hard to imagine that SSD would ever hit the main stream. Well Toshiba, drinking from the Koolaide, believes that a 512GB SSD drive is a possibility by 2009.

The market for SSDs used in notebook PCs will surge on average 313 percent per year through 2011, according to a report from Nikkei Business Publications. The report referred to a speech given by Toshiba Semiconductor Company’s President Shozo Saito at an International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA) function in Japan on the 18th.

By 2010, SSD-based notebooks will be about 10 percent of the market, then jumping to 25 percent in 2011, Saito said.

The increase in capacity will be accompanied by sharp reductions in cost per bit, the biggest barrier to SSD adoption this year. An oft-cited example is the Apple MacBook Air. The Air model with a 64GB SSD is about $1,200 more than the model with a larger capacity 80GB hard disk drive. The price difference is largely attributed to the premium a buyer must pay for an SSD.

If the price for NAND flash memory is reduced by 50 percent per year, the price gap will shrink (by 2011) to 1.4 and 3.2 times the price of 1.8- and 2.5-inch hard disk drives, respectively, Saito said.

It is all about economies of scale, but SSD will - in my opinion - lag behind good ol’ traditional pattered drives and will always have a much higher premium.

Do you think Toshiba has gone insane by these predictions or do you believe that 2009 - 2010 will be the year of SSD?

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