OCZ Technology chief exec Ryan Petersen said in an interview conducted by X-bit labs that solid state and mechanical disks will approach parity in three to five years.

“This dual usage pairing an SSD as a boot drive with a HDD for mass storage will persist during the transition period, but as you move three to five years out the prices per gigabyte for SSDs will continue to get closer. As the delta decreases, adoption of SSDs will only increase and we will definitely see this transition in PCs,” Petersen said.

Petersen’s statements fall in line with those by analysts which suggest that the NAND market has not yet hit critical mass. Though the price of NAND continues to fall, it does so through process improvements and die shrinks, not through demand. Many believe that demand-based pricing won’t kick in until 2012 or 2013 when the process improvements have pushed the prices low enough to trigger an upswell in consumer demand.

For additional comments from Petersen and SanDisk CEO Eli Harari, visit the full interview at X-bit labs.