As expected at DiskCon, the disk drive industry conference being held this week in Santa Clara, there has been a lot of talks about drives. But not so much about the traditional magnetic spinning drive, as opposed to its Flash memory or SSD (solid state drive) competitor!

Case in point, was the conference's luncheon keynote by the general manager of Sandisk's SSD business unit, Rich Heye (pictured). In his expose, Heye is betting on a rapid growth of the consumer Netbook market that he estimates will reach 4 million units this year (from a mere 635,000 units in '07), 10 millions in 2009 and 33 millions in 2012!

"No consumer products have grown that fast!", said Heye.

Heye gave 2 reasons for "weeping of joy" when he looks at the Netbook market potential for his business:

1- Storage is the largest netbook line item (24% of the total cost of the machine vs 14% for LCD, 13% for the CPU+chipset and 6% for software) because most of the netbooks will use low-cost screens, CPUs and a free operating system;

2- And most of those low-cost small laptops will carry cheap 32 GB (the sweet-spot capacity for this category) pSSDs (Sandisk name for its consumer SSD line) instead of hard drives.

Intel is a non-player in the consumer SSD market!

For Heye, netbooks will be the largest segment for SSDs this year and the next. Competition wise, the general manager of Sandisk's SSD business unit dismissed Intel as being a real competitor in the consumer market. "They are a pricey competitor. Intel's $1,000 dollars SSD is targeted to the enterprise space, not the netbook market. They're a non player!", Heye said.

Heye sees 2 sweet-spots for the SSD market:

1- For netbooks, it'll be the 32 GB capacity;

2- And 120 GB for the laptop category. A minimum requirement to run Windows Vista!

"And once we reach those capacities for their respective markets, the strategy will be to drive the prices down. $200 for a 120 GB SSD will really drive up the adoption of solid state drives", added Heye.

Here's the video of the end of Heye keynote (the summary part!) and his answer on the competition with Intel: