They are not considered the sexiest bit of hardware, but Kingston Technology is backing solid state drives (SSDs) and reckons this year will mark the turning point in adoption.

Since being founded in 1987, Kingston’s heritage was in the Dynamic random access memory (DRAM) space before it turned its attention towards the consumer space and Flash drives, helped by products such as USBs and memory cards. It took its first steps in the SSD world only last year but is confident about the growth potential there.

"Over the next three to five years, we think it has the potential to contribute $500m to $1bn of additional revenue," Darwin Chen, VP flash and SSD, Kingston Technology told CBR. "We see 2010 being a turning point for SSD adoption, meaning that on the client side, not just the server side, they will start to make a big impact."

Chen believes that this boost on the client side will be driven by economics – the recession meant that many companies avoided a hardware refresh and many PCs are now coming towards the end of their life. However, shrinking IT budgets mean that ripping out PCs and laptops and starting again is not economically viable for many organisations.

This is where SSDs come in, Chen believes. "The business challenge for CIOs is a lack of IT money available, and a lot of what is available has been focused on the server side. There is a huge opportunity for CIOs to look at a better return on investment from their client side IT spending by incorporating SSDs."

CIOs have three choices: they can do nothing until their systems collapse, spend a lot of money on new systems, or look at the best way of upgrading the current infrastructure.

Replacing ageing hard drives (HDs) with SSDs can boost performance by around 40%, Chen believes, as well as extend the life of a PC by a couple of years. It can also reduce costs, which may come as a surprise to many people who believe that SSDs are simply too expensive for widespread adoption.

"To buy a new system can cost up to $1,000," Chen says. "To replace or upgrade your HD with a SSD is $250. The cost of SSDs has been coming down for a while now and is reaching a sweet spot. They are still expensive when compared to hard drives but two years ago SSDs cost around $3.75 per gigabyte (GB), now it’s $2. By 2012 it could be down to $0.60."

Chen added that the price has got to a point where, coupled with the performance boost they can provide, more and more organisations are investing in SSD technology.

So if the price point is now down to a level where it makes sense for companies to invest in SSD, how do vendors like Kingston get their message across? Chen admits that it’s not the hottest bit of kit out there, but that doesn’t bother the company.

"It’s not sexy, we get that. We’ve lived 25 years in an unsexy world, we know how to do unsexy," Chen says. "It’s not the latest server architecture or a start up attracting VC money; it’s the nitty-gritty blue collar stuff. But that’s been our business since day one: how to help companies extend the lifecycle of their existing assets and I think that’s the one thing missing from the discussion about SSD."

For all its confident predictions about the future of SSDs Kingston is already seeing a pick up in the present. In the UK the firm sold as many units during the first four months of this year as it did during the whole of last year and has an internal projection of a run rate of 100,000 units per month by the end of this year or early next year.