An increasing number of applications such as personal media players, video recorders, and televisions with built-in time-shifting capabilities continue to drive the need for larger and more cost-effective storage capacity. With hard drives and Flash memory achieving more impressive densities, this capacity is quickly making its way to consumers.
From one perspective, hard drive and Flash memory technology seem to be in direct competition with each other, with Flash striving to be the "DVD" to hard drive's "VHS". Flash offers fast access and higher reliability than conventional hard drives. Hard drives utilize a mechanical system comprising magnetic storage and a spinning platter compared to Flash's solid state non-volatile memory which relies upon no moving parts to store small amounts of electrical charge in semiconductor transistor structures. However, engineers are not limited to using only one technology. In fact, for many applications, using a hybrid approach may offer the best advantages of both.
Market momentum
Flash has achieved significant market momentum because of its successful integration into mobile multimedia devices, which utilize two main forms of non-volatile storage: NAND Flash and hard disk drives. Hard drives continue to hold the high capacity market but the growth in the NAND Flash market has been amazing. Because NAND density doubles every year, compared to hard drive density doubling every two years, Flash continues to penetrate into applications traditionally served by hard drives alone.
As it is conceivable that the storage requirements for an OS, applications, and multimedia content will continue to consume as much capacity as can be provided on a cost-effective basis, the primary factor determining which storage technology to use is whether consumer demand for increased storage capacity continues to outpace the "sweet spot" in price/performance for Flash. While Flash can be expected to make new inroads in low-storage applications, as a technology it has a long way to go to close the overall capacity gap with hard drives.
For high-capacity applications, then, Flash will not replace rotating storage in the near future. And likewise, unless video completely transforms cell phones to personal video players, hard drives will never penetrate the handset market.
Where Flash will create a difficult decision for engineers is when Flash will be able to supply enough storage to support a mainstream OS and appropriate business applications at a reasonable price point. Flash can provide such capacity today but only at a 10-20x price premium compared to hard drives, and so it is no real threat at this time.
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