Are SSDs undermining the PC upgrade cycle?

Jim Handy makes his case on Forbes that solid state disks have a radical impact on sales in both the desktop PC and the server market. The writer speculates that PC replacement cycles have become longer as many corporate environment IT managers (as well as enthusiasts) discovered that the costly process of replacing the entire PC can be postponed by simply replacing the HDD with an SSD. The same story occurs in the server market, IT managers see big gains after adopting SSDs, which results in fewer server sales.

In many corporate environments IT managers have found that they can postpone the costly process of refreshing the staff’s PCs by a year or longer by simply replacing the hard drive (HDD) in employees’ PCs with an SSD. Since the PC is between 2-3 years old at that point the HDD is usually pretty small (say 80GB) and an SSD of a similar capacity will cost around $100, which looks pretty good in comparison to a $600-1,000 price tag for a notebook PC.

Kingston Technology was the first company I ran across to promote such a program, and their corporate customers were thrilled to find that PC users were just as pleased with the results of swapping out the drives as they would have been with a new PC.