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Samsung's annual Global SSD Summit featured the normal product announcements and presentations outlining the company's latest flash-based advances, but the company also outlined its vision of the current state of the SSD market and future trends. SSDs are steadily displacing HDDs in more applications, but NVMe is shaping up to be the dark horse that may put the venerable HDD to rest.

Samsung has been rather vocal lately about its leading position in the SSD industry and is quick to throw out plenty of claims to underline its dominance, but as a matter of course, we favor independent third-party market reports. We'll cover that later. First, let's look at the trends Samsung identified as the primary industry drivers.





Samsung gained much of its lead on the back of its 3D NAND, but that advantage is expiring. Micron recently expanded its Singapore fab, which focuses on 32-layer 3D NAND, by an additional 225,000 square feet. Intel, which participates in the joint IMFT (Intel/Micron Flash Technologies) partnership, also stands to gain from the increased output, but it is also plowing ahead with its own 3D NAND aspirations. Sk Hynix is reportedly ramping up to 48-layer products, which will increase output, and we've already seen its 36-layer 3D NAND in the wild. The Toshiba/WD Flash Forward partnership still lags behind the other fabs, but the company expects significant 3D BiCS volume by mid-2017.

We should expect some serious jockeying in the SSD market over the coming year, but Samsung is turning to other methods to gain a new advantage. 3D NAND is much cheaper to produce than regular planar NAND, but many opine that Samsung isn't passing all of the savings to the consumer, because there hasn't been any serious competition. As more fabs start pumping out 3D NAND, we can expect pricing to plunge even further, which is good for everyone. It may also accelerate other trends, such as the (so far) excruciatingly slow death of the HDD in the consumer market.