Global shipments of SSDs will reach 43 million units in 2013, according to a new report by Research and Market.

The report says that in the near future, flash-based solid-state drives (SSD) are expected to challenge the hard disk drives (HDD) in the mobile computer market.

It also predicts that most cost effective SSD solutions, which are currently around 16GB, will approach 256GB by 2013.

The decreasing flash memory prices and the shift to mobile computing are pushing SSDs from the data center to the PC, says the report. It notes however, that this transition will not happen overnight due to a number of issues, including drive density limitations, cost and performance.

“In the last years, the adoption of SSDs in PCs and netbooks has been limited by speed, capacity and cost constrains,” said Tareq Husseini, SanDisk’s Middle East and Africa Sales Director.

“But when one examines the declining cost trends for flash, and the consumer’s need for storage and the premium that users place on the benefits provided by SSDs, it is easy to see that there will be a clear demand for SSDs in the near future.”

SanDisk aims to grab half of the SSDs market share for the mobile PC sector in 2010.

According to Husseini, SSDs, which are made from NAND flash memory chips, hold several advantages over common HDDs including being speedier, lighter and use far less power.

SSDs also tend to be more rugged than a standard hard drive because the NAND flash memory they use lacks the moving parts found in a hard drive.-TradeArabia News Service