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Micron: Thailand causing demand pick-up for SSDs

Demand for solid-state drives is increasing in the wake of the flooding in Thailand, which has caused a shortage of hard disk drives.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
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Micron Technology said today that demand is increasing for solid-state drives in the wake of the flooding in Thailand.

Micron told CNET that it is seeing an increase in demand due to the flooding in Thailand.
Micron told CNET that it is seeing an increase in demand due to the flooding in Thailand. Micron

Since late summer, the prices of traditional spinning hard disk drives have been steadily rising because of shortages due to flooding in Thailand. That country accounts for about 70 percent of global hard drive-related production. And recently Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman said that large customers are calling HP because they can't get drives.

Micron Technology, one of the largest flash memory chip manufacturers in the world, told CNET today that the solid-state drive industry has seen orders spike.

"Clearly there's an increase in demand because of the Thailand flooding. There's fewer hard drives and open slots and an SSD can fit in that slot nicely," Kevin Kilbuck, Director of Marketing for Micron's NAND Solutions Group, told CNET today. Kilbuck is referring to the fact many SSDs today can plug into the same slots inside PCs that have traditionally accommodated HDDs.

And ultrabooks are also driving demand. "Look at ultrabooks. Because ultrabooks will either be 100 percent SSD or using a small SSD as a cache plus a hard drive," Troy Winslow, director of marketing for Intel's Flash Division, told CNET today.