China Solid-State Drive Market Trends

Market Trends of China Solid-State Drive Industry

Enterprise SSDs Expected To Grow Significantly

• The Chinese solid-state drive market continued its rapid pace of growth, driven primarily by enterprise and data center demand, as well as PC demand. Many enterprise applications need constant uptime, high-performance storage devices, high reliability, and power efficiency. SSDs fulfill all these requirements in the enterprise.
• Due to the NAND flash shortage in 2017, the enterprise channel SSD market grew at a more modest rate. The demand was fueled by hyper-scale data centers, such as Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and OEMs, including Huawei and Inspur.
• NAND flash is certain to become the core technology in the development of storage and memory industries in the future as the number of consumer electronic products that include solid-state drives (SSDs) and embedded MultiMediaCards (eMMCs) increases. Chinese domestic DRAM and NAND flash consumption is dramatically increasing with the rise in popularity of Chinese PCs in enterprises. With the increase in the production of PCs in the region, the demand for SSDs has been increasing in the market.
• SSDs in enterprises store data persistently or cache data in the non-volatile semiconductor memory temporarily and are intended for use in servers, storage systems, and direct-attached storage (DAS) devices. Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) uses MLC SSD, which contains a longer life span than TLC SSD and a relatively friendlier price than SLC SSD. Due to its higher capacity and lower cost, users of TLC SSD are general customers.
• Further, the fingerprint sensor may be given as a prime feature in portable solid-state drives (SSDs), and players are focused on innovating such technology with SSD. In April 2020 despite the negative impact of pandemic, Chinese firm Hikvision launched its T100F portable SSD in the Chinese market. This SDD comes with biometric security and an embedded fingerprint sensor into the metal casing of the SSD.

Increased Adoption in Data Centers Expected to Boost the Market Growth

• The applications of SSD in data centers have been increasing owing to a wide range of factors, such as the rising need for storage facilities, improved efficacy in contrast to conventional HDD storage, and breakthroughs in enterprise-level SSD reliability and performance.
• Moreover, SSDs are preferred by businesses as they require less energy, which enables less dispersion, thereby resulting in a reduced environmental imprint.
• According to Cloudscene, China had approximately 50 internet users per 100 in 2020, and the connectivity ecosystem comprised 85 colocation data centers, 62 cloud service providers, and one network fabric. The increasing demand for memory devices, buoyed by the requirement of data centers for memory, is expected to drive the demand for SSDs.
• The growth in the Chinese data center market is expected to be bolstered by supportive government initiatives and international investments. The government's push for AI in security and intelligence use further strengthens the demand for SSDs in the country.
• For instance, Apple started constructing its first Chinese data center to expand its services in China. The project would respond to new Chinese data laws that demand the citizens' data to be hosted on Chinese soil. Thus, the abovementioned factors are expected to bolster the demand for SSDs in the country.