Report claims 55 percent of all retail laptops will carry SSDs by 2019

Any PC enthusiast will tell you that upgrading from a mechanical hard drive to a solid-state drive can be one of the biggest and most immediate improvements a user can make. The differences are very obvious in day-to-day loads and to enthusiasts who are accustomed to using primary SSDs instead of primary HDDs. Nonetheless, walk into any brick-and-mortar electronics store and most laptops from budget models to even gaming models are still shipping with slow 5400 RPM HDDs to keep costs down.

A new report from DigiTimes is predicting that this could soon change as SSD prices continue to fall. Citing sources close to the publication, major manufacturers like HP and Dell are looking to boost adoption rates of 256 GB SSDs on more mainstream systems. The "oversupply of memory chips" and "improved yield rates" should make the move viable as early as next year so long as prices do not spike. Currently, many retailers are still pushing laptops equipped with primary HDDs since major manufacturers are able to reach more attractive sticker prices with very low-end HDD SKUs. As for the limited storage capacity of SSDs, vendors can still offer secondary HDDs alongside the primary SSD.

These entry-level SSDs are unlikely to be NVMe SSDs or QLC SSDs commonly found on the latest Ultrabooks, PCs, or gaming notebooks. Despite this, even the slowest SATA III SSDs can be almost an order of magnitude faster than the common 1 TB HDD. It's definitely a good start.

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