20 Million NVMe SSDs
Samsung Electronics recently signed a new SSD supply contract for its 256 GB SSDs to be used in the laptops of major suppliers such as Apple and Microsoft. The contract volume is estimated at 20 million units, and the supply is predicted to be completed by the second half of next year. The products are said to adopt the new standard of Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe).
According to market research firm IHS Technology, the global market of NVMe-based SSDs is expected to reach approximately 25 million units in size this year. However, its previous estimate was one million units, which shows how fast the market is growing nowadays. Both Apple and Microsoft recently adjusted their operating systems so that NVMe SSDs can be used in their laptops.
The new technical standard allows an SSD to be perfectly utilized, whereas it has previously been impossible for existing SSDs to reach 100 percent performance due to their sharing of standards with HDDs. An NVMe SSD is capable of processing data in greater quantities and at higher speeds at the same time.
At present, Samsung Electronics is recording a share of about 40 percent in the global SSD market, and is trying to grab a bigger slice of its pie by means of new technical standards. The company announced the mass production of the world’s first NVMe SSDs for use in enterprise servers in July 2013, and those for use in laptops in April this year.