Gartner, an industry market research firm covering the computer and IT market, predicts that prices for SSD (Solid State Drive) storage drives will drop below $1 per gigabyte in the second half of 2012. That's about 1/2 of current prices. SSDs, which use NAND flash technology are smaller, more power efficient and faster than conventional hard drives, but their high price and smaller capacities have limited their attractiveness to the consumer market. A traditional hard drive has capacity of up to 3TB, for which prices can be as low as 5-cents per gigabyte.
Gartner also believes that falling prices will help SSDs become mainstays for storage in consumer PCs and tablets. Already, SSDs are finding their way into laptops such as the Apple MacBook Air and Dell Adamo series.
SSD's high pricing has usually limited their application to systems with little storage and slower processors.
