The document analyzes customer review data from SSD manufacturers to determine which brands are most popular and highest rated. Crucial SSDs have the highest average rating of 92.4%, followed by Intel at 89.7%. OCZ has the most reviews but the lowest average rating. Crucial performs particularly well in reviews for high density SSDs over 500GB, competing with industry leader OCZ. The $150-200 price range and 120-150GB size segment are the most reviewed products overall.

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Solid-State Society, Part III: Who’s popular, who’s not?
In our last report, our analysis of retail solid-state disks (SSDs) revealed that only a small
portion of the industry is benefitting from new competition, while high densities have actually
gone up in price per gigabyte over the last year. In Part II of our report we delved into which
manufacturers seemed to driving the growth in the variously sized segments, and who seemed
to be coming late to the party. Now, in Part III, we’ll take a different approach, and look at which
manufacturers appear to be producing the best products that make for the happiest customers.
Using Dynamite Data’s proprietary extraction technology, we are able to aggregate the number
of customer reviews and ratings for every solid state hard drive sold online in the United States.
The power of our analytics is that we are not relying on extrapolated data to determine trends
regarding the industry, but on the actual data points present in the channel.
Our engine extracts the average customer rating and review count, per product, at every
Internet Retailer Top500 merchant. Fraudulent reviews have been removed by our filters. All
review methodologies have been normalized into percentages. So a product review that yielded
4 out of 5 eggs at Newegg.com would count as 80% in our metrics. At the 10,000 foot level, we
wanted to determine the best rated SSD brand in the Top500. We did this by taking all of the
review scores and averaging them across each manufacturer:
Manufacturer vs. Weighted Average Rating
100.0% 92.4% 89.7%
90.0% 83.2% 80.7%
79.2% 79.0% 76.8%
80.0%
70.0%
Average Rating
60.0%
50.0%
Transcend
Kingston
A DATA
Corsair
Crucial
40.0%
Intel
OCZ
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
Manufacturer
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 1 July 11, 2011

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Our previous two Solid State Society columns this year have illustrated how OCZ was early to
market, and often the low-cost leader, giving them a leg up in adoption. However, our data
shows that this rush to be first may have penalized the brand’s perceived quality, as the
average product review grabs a 76.8% approval rating. The average rating at Crucial, by
comparison, is 92.4%. Intel holds second place, with a score of 89.7%.
Next we looked at the raw number of reviews each manufacturer had received:
Manufacturer vs. Number of Reviews
12000
10000 9540
8000
Average Rating
Transcend
6000 Kingston
A DATA
Corsair
Crucial
OCZ
Intel
4000
2836
2000 1443
1122
202 334 495
0
Density Segment
OCZ and Crucial net substantially more reviews than the other manufactures (OCZ more than
the rest of the field combined). This is indicative of OCZ’s ubiquitous presence in the SSD
channel, which it must be remembered is at least partly due to the fact that they have been
offering SSDs for longer than many of the other manufacturers.
Just five manufactures; OCZ, Crucial, Kingston, Intel and Corsair account for more than 95% of
the total SSD reviews available on the Top500. We limited the rest of our analysis to these
manufacturers.
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 2 July 11, 2011

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Using the same segmentation rules from our previous Solid State Society analyses, we
analyzed if any manufacturer was particularly outshining another in any density category. As a
refresher; we characterized densities less than 100GB, inclusive, as low density, greater than
200GB, exclusive, as high density, and everything else as medium density. OCZ accounts for a
significant portion of all reviews in the medium and especially low density sizes.
The data also indicates that, as we expected, as density increases the overall numbers of
reviews trends lower:
Density Segment vs. Number of Reviews
6000 5604
5000
Number of Reviews
4000
3203
3000
2000
1206
892 731 738 733
1000 692
313 418
221 198 117 294 76
0
Low Medium High
Crucial 892 1206 738
Intel 313 692 117
Kingston 731 418 294
Corsair 221 198 76
OCZ 5604 3203 733
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 3 July 11, 2011

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Crucial shows surprising strength in the highest density segment, with comparable numbers of
reviews to OCZ and the highest average review score:
Density Segment vs. Weighted Average Rating
100.0%
90.0%
80.0%
70.0%
Average Rating
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
Low Medium High
Crucial 96.9% 93.6% 84.9%
Intel 91.2% 89.8% 84.5%
Kingston 80.0% 78.9% 78.0%
Corsair 80.0% 78.9% 76.3%
OCZ 80.7% 71.2% 71.9%
While OCZ appears to be in full control of the low and mid density categories, Crucial is giving
OCZ significant competition in the high density category. The high end category is a two horse
race with Kingston in the distance. It will be interesting to track to see what changes here with
the new performance enterprise products that are being introduced. Management at Intel should
be asking “what happened,” as it appears that they have great customer reviews but relatively
few of them, which is most likely a result of fewer products and overall lower unit sales. Knowing
Intel they will not put up with that for long.
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 4 July 11, 2011

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Our next exercise was to find the market sweet spots for both price point and product density.
That is, we would like to know where the most reviews are accumulating both in terms of
product price point and SSD size:
Average Price Segments vs. Number of Reviews
6000
5000
4000
Number of Reviews
3000
2000
1000
0
$600
$850
$100
$150
$200
$250
$300
$350
$400
$450
$500
$550
$650
$700
$750
$800
$900
$950
$1,000
>$1,000
$50
Average Price
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 5 July 11, 2011

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The $150 to $200 segment attracted the most reviews, followed by the $250 to $300 segment.
$200 to $250 rounds out the third most popular range. We expected this as unit sales are
larger in the smaller and earlier to market drives. More than 85% of all SSD purchases are in
the $150 to $300 range.
Looking at drive densities, more than 70% of the reviews were in the 100 to 200 GB sizes:
Density Segments vs. Number of Reviews
7000
6000
5000
4000
Number of Reviews
3000
2000
1000
0
50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 >600
Average Price
Inside this range, the 120 to 150 GB density was by far the most popular, with popular devices
from every manufacturer. This data however, was significantly driven by OCZ’s strong
presence in the low end density categories.
In reviewing this data for publication, we came across two other interesting observations. The
first was our attempt to see if there was any correlation between device price and number of
reviews. We would expect to see that the inexpensive devices obtain more reviews, since the
total cost of ownership is less. For some manufacturers, this is not the case. Crucial contributes
over 600 reviews to the graph above with its expensive flagship product, a 256 GB drive that
retails on average for over $600, and is one of its top three most-reviewed products.
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 6 July 11, 2011

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One of the most interesting trends we noticed in this analysis was that overall for the market the
higher density drives tended to have a significantly lower average rating than the lower density
devices. Relatedly, individual manufacturers trended in different directions when comparing their
average ratings across their product lines:
Average Price vs. Weighted Average Rating
100%
90%
Average Rating (out of %100)
80%
70%
60% Crucial
50% OCZ
40% Linear (Crucial)
Linear (OCZ)
30%
20%
10%
0%
$0 $100 $200 $300 $400 $500 $600 $700 $800 $900 $1,000
Average Price
As indicated by the trend lines above, OCZ, for all practical purposes, was unchanged, on
average, across all price categories. Crucial had significant improvement in the highest
densities.
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 7 July 11, 2011

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Average Price vs. Weighted Average Rating
100%
90%
Corsair
Average Rating (out of %100)
80%
70% Crucial
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
$0 $100 $200 $300 $400 $500 $600 $700 $800 $900 $1,000
Average Price
Some manufacturers, notably Intel and Crucial, trended upwards when we plotted the product
price across average score. Corsair, on the other hand, trended downwards on the more
expensive products. This data may indicate that Corsair is trending in a precarious direction if
early-adopter customers are relatively unhappy with their high-end products. These trends
clearly need to be more closely monitored and may receive particular attention in our next
installment.
In summary, OCZ is untouchable in the total number of reviews, most likely giving them the
largest installed base and they should be viewed as the industry leader.
Intel with their name, good customer acceptance and market presence can be a force if they get
their act together. Crucial is producing the best product by far, with great customer acceptance,
especially in the highest densities. In our minds, what we have today is a two horse race (OCZ,
Crucial) with one other (Intel) following and the rest of the field still at the starting gate.
In our next analysis we will likely analyze density segments versus review counts over time, but
feel free to contact us to get a sneak peak before our next installment of Solid State Society.
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 8 July 11, 2011

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About Us:
Dynamite Data delivers the most comprehensive and timely ecommerce data in the world on
technology and consumer electronics. Our proprietary web extraction technology monitors
current pricing and product availability data on almost nine million products across more than
600 U.S. and International online merchants. Over the last four years we have assembled a
database of more than 140 million actual buy pages and we continue to extract and update tens
of millions of buy pages each day. Accurate current and historical price, availability and other
key competitive information is delivered to our customers through our SaaS Channel Monitor
dashboard interface or through our API feed directly into their business intelligence systems.
Our customers include hard-drive and semiconductor manufactures and some of the largest and
most visible e-commerce retailers in North America. Contact us today to find out how we can
help take your business to the next level: sales@dynamitedata.com.
Copyright © 2011 Dynamite Data, LLC 9 July 11, 2011