Once again, the first thing to do is take a look at the raw data on flash memory. Like the other data, it is taken in half yearly samples, one in March and the other in September, if possible, and it records the best price found of each different size of flash memory in the magazine. There are a large number of different types of flash cards, for example, Compact Flash, Secure Digital, Memory Stick and Kodak Memory Card. No distinction has been made of which type of flash memory was used in obtaining the cheapest price although in recent years, the Compact Flash type has a price/capacity lead over the other types. Thumb drives are also available for consideration in the survey but they generally are not the cheapest way to purchase flash memory
I have made a FAQ for people that have questions about my methodology for this study.
Improvement In Bang Per Buck
Flash memory products made their first appearances in the 1st half of 99 as an accessory for digital cameras. Immediately, during their first year they showed dramatic price improvements and have continued to do so since.
The graph shows a very lumpy but continuously improving trend. The average for the entire 7 years is 125% improvement each year. This handily beats out the long term trend for hard disks which this site measured at 100% per annum.
The short term trend is more interesting, especially when compared with recent the recent trend for hard disks. The three year improvement for flash comes in at 109% whereas for hard disks over the same period the figure is only 35%. This is an ominous trend for hard disks because if it continues we could see an end to their general use as the primary storage device on most computers. Ive written a more detailed analysis on this here.
Flash continues to set a cracking pace with substantial bang per buck improvements already achieved since the annual March survey was taken.
Annual Sweet Spot Capacity Increases
The sweet spot is defined here as the size of the flash storage card that has the best Meg per $ figure for any half year sample. Like hard disks but unlike RAM, most people only use one flash card at a time. For example, a person can have several flash storage cards but because the camera they use the cards in will only use one at a time it is much more common to own just the one card.
Please
be aware of the logarithmic scale used on this chart. The trend
has been an average 65% increase per year with no recent signs of
any slow down. In fact just one month after the March survey when
the data us collected the sweet spot jumped to 2 Gig.
To see what will drive the adoption of ever increasing card sizes, it might be worth while to look at what they have been used for up until now.
Flash cards entered the market as a removable storage method for digital cameras. With an average modern compact digital camera capturing approximately 6 Mega-pixel images which then compresses down to about 3 megabytes, a 1 Gig flash card will hold about 330 images. In 5 years we can expect the sweet spot to be around the 16 GigaByte point. While people may see the need to store up to 330 images on their camera at any one time before they get the chance to edit, print or vet them on a computer it is difficult to see very much market demand for storing 5000 images for use in the same way. Image sensor sizes may increase over the same period but as they already approach near film quality, it is difficult to see any reason for them to improve much past 10 Mega-pixel. Especially in the consumer space.
The current market creating demand for flash memory is the personal music player segment. To get an idea of how far the music player market will drive flash capacities it is worth while taking a look at how much music people actually own and therefore how much they will want to store. This BBC article shows that men own, on average, 178 albums (women, on average, own less) with less that 10% of men owning 500 or more. Lets do some calculations to determine what the average and then the 90th percentile need for storage could be.
The current market creating demand for flash memory is the personal music player segment. To get an idea of how far the music player market will drive flash capacities it is worth while taking a look at how much music people actually own and therefore how much they will want to store. This BBC article shows that men own, on average, 178 albums (women, on average, own less) with less that 10% of men owning 500 or more. Lets do some calculations to determine what the average and then the 90th percentile need for storage could be.
178 (albums) * 650MB (maximum data per album) * 192 Kb/sec (good quality compression rate) / 1411.2 Kb (per sec data rate e on the CD) = 15741.5 MB. This is under 16 GB to store the average mans music collection.
500 (albums) * 650MB (data per album) * 192 Kb/sec (compressed data rate) / 1411.2 Kb (per sec rate on the CD) = 44220.8 MB. This means 90% of the market can store their entire music collection on a 45 Gig Drive.
The next likely market to drive demand for flash memory is in the cam-corder market. A mini DV tape holds 60 minutes of video @ 3.6 MB/second (DV PAL standard definition PAL 720x576 @ 25 fps) giving a capacity of ~12.6 GB. A prosumer flash based video camera might have at least 16GB or even 32GB of flash storage included. High definition cameras should become standard in a few years and that would increase the storage requirement about four fold pushing the storage requirement up to 128 Gig.
Laptop and compact computers may well become an area for demand during this time.