Flash and Disk Trends

If you have read my pages on flash memory trends and hard disk trends you will have seen the annual price improvement charts for these two types o media. Overlaying these two charts reveals an impressive trend for Flash .

As can be seen, flash is improving at a considerably higher rate than disk in annual bang per buck terms.

Its worth getting some perspective on where their prices are in absolute terms, i.e. megs per dollar, for each commonly available form factor of disk. You can see these in the table below for flash, 1.8, 2.5 and 3.5 inch hard disks.

Another way of comparing these numbers is by ratio, giving flash a purchasing power value of one and compare the different disk sizes in relation to this. This has been listed in the second column. Looking at these figures you can see its possible to buy 23 times the storage per dollar with 3.5 inch disks compared with flash.

For some historical perspective, the last time I calculated these figures was in July 2006, 20 months ago and these figures are in the last column.

Comparing the ratios between the two dates also seems to indicate that when a particular drive size gets closer to price parity with flash it becomes more competitive, giving ground less quickly to flash, almost as if fighting for its life. In a way, they are. One inch drives are no longer viable in the market. 1.8 inch drives whose mainstay is sub-notebooks, camcorders and high capacity MP3 players should be feeling the pinch in about a year. Flash has significant advantages over disk for these applications. It's physically smaller, more robust, and uses less power than 1.8 inch drives all of which make it desirable even before it reaches price parity with flash.

A continuation of the previous 5 year trend will mean that 2.5 inch drives would be gone in about 4 years. Somewhere around half of all hard disks sold today are 2.5 inch drives going into laptops and in 5 years time the figure will be 66%. The loss of two thirds of market share in about a 12 month period will be devastating for any hard disk manufacturer that is not also a major manufacturer of flash memory products.

Finally, we come to 3.5 inch drives. Again, if the previous 5 year trend continues, it will be 6 years before price parity occurs. At that point I cant think of a convincing reason to buy a hard disk. They're larger, heavier, more delicate, use more power, hotter, noisier, and slower (seek and probably by then transfer).

Ideas welcome

I'm looking for corrections, comments, alternate analysis of the results or even ideas of new ways to look at the data. If you have any of these then please send me a mail to matt21811@yahoo.com.au with your contribution. Thanks!

Matt's Computer Trends