Flash and Solid State Drives: Facts and Forecasts

This is an interesting article, a bit in depth and long, but interesting non the less.

I put the conclusion here for those that don't want to read the six page article.

This little investigative article will be devoted to the development and changes in the flash memory market. We are going to dwell particularly on the most interesting flash memory application – solid state drives.

In early October the microelectronics standardization body JEDEC held a series of seminars about the prospects of the flash memory market in general and of solid state drives in particular. Flash memory means much more to computer users than memory cards or USB drives. SSDs are not only trendy but also practical. The global economic recession has delayed the arrival of inexpensive flash-based storage devices but specialists do expect them very soon. How soon, exactly? Let's hear what the involved people, the developers of standards, technologies and end products, have to say about that.

In this article we will present the main facts extracted from the keynotes delivered at a JEDEC seminar to show you the big picture of the development of flash memory and its use in solid state drives.

One thing that we must keep in mind is that computers are not the most important application of nonvolatile memory. Flash-based storage devices in all their varieties are actually among the least popular products that use such memory, being only ahead of the car industry in this respect. Thus, the market in general cannot be affected much by how popular SSDs are or will be.
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We can expect the price of 1 gigabyte of a consumer SSD with MLC memory to drop to $1 in 2012 (corporate SSDs are going to notch the $1-per-gigabyte mark in 2014).
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Conclusion

Summing up the facts presented in this article, we can give you the following synopsis. The development of social networks and related services provokes users’ interest in multimedia-supporting digital devices which need rather large displays and amounts of memory. Tablet PCs suit this purpose very well, so they have a chance to capture a share of the notebook market as well as to create their own market niche, stimulating the growth of the flash memory and SSD markets. In two years the cost of storing data on SSDs is expected to drop to $1 per gigabyte. Moreover, the 2012-model-year SSDs will be much faster than today’s $100 products. And in six years more, SSDs will exceed traditional HDDs in terms of total storage space. It is going to be very interesting to watch the new technologies and devices emerge on the market during that process.

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I hope the price per GB drops like they are forecasting.

Would be nice to see some of the predictions come true. Nice to see $1/GB.

$1 per GigaByte still seems high to me. Production costs need to come down.

jebuchanan said:

$1 per GigaByte still seems high to me. Production costs need to come down.

It is high compared to mechanical drives today. But as time passes, they'll come down. Just a matter of when.

I guess this got moved.

Thought it was an interesting article, the SSD info and amount of nand used in SSDs and other devices, the future of nand, how tablets are possibly going to rise for the average users due to not requiring a full powered computer, when the SSD price will fall to $1/GB, when they will take the storage lead from HDDs.

You're welcome sygnus21, glad you liked it, thought it was interesting.