The SSD may be faster and offer power savings compared to the traditional HDD, but a few downsides to SSDs have kept them from overtaking the traditional HDD in the consumer market. Those downsides include lower capacities and higher costs.

The NAND flash memory that is integral to the SSD is set to see prices drop reports iSuppli. The iSuppli report predicts that pricing on 3-bit per cell NAND flash will drop to the range of $1 per gigabyte. That is the range when analysts predict that SSDs will be able to compete with HDDs on price and may signal the increased adoption of the SSD by the general consumer.

Analyst Michael Yang from iSuppli pegs the price of 1GB TLC NAND flash memory would average $1.20 for the entire fourth quarter of 2010 and then decrease to the $1 mark by the beginning of 2011. If the price hits the $1 mark it will be a huge decrease in prices since the start of 2010 with the same 1GB of NAND was selling in the $1.80 range.

Yang said, "When NAND pricing first fell below the $1 level at the end of 2008, many observers opined that this would sound the starting gun for solid state storage, allowing the technology to be cost competitive with Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in PCs for the first time. However, during the following quarters, pricing rose because of strong demand and constrained production capacity, limiting the appeal of SSDs to low-volume servers in data centers and preventing widespread adoption in high-volume business and consumer PCs."

Yang also stated that for the SSD to be price competitive with the traditional HDD the cost of 1GB of NAND would need to decline to the range of $0.40 per gigabyte by 2012. At that price for a gigabyte of NAND, the cost of a 100GB SSD with the supporting electronics would be $50.

Yang continued, adding, "With NAND pricing having returned to per-gigabyte pricing levels not seen in two years, there’s likely to be a lot of new buzz created for the solid state storage market at the end of 2010. However, traditional HDDs gained a lot of additional ground during the past few years in terms of rising capacity and falling prices. In fact, HDDs have gained so much ground that SSDs now are in danger of never regaining their competitive footing."