iSuppli recently announced a survey about the use of flash memory as primary storage in portable devices, I.e. laptops. The survey points to that more than half of all laptops will be shipped with some sort of flash harddrive during the fourth quarter of 2009, compared to today where the figure is just slightly higher than one or two.
“In the fourth quarter of 2009, 24 million notebook PCs will be sold with some form of flash data storage, compared to a mere 143,600 in the first quarter of 2007, iSuppli predicts. This means that nearly 60 percent of the 40.1 million notebook shipments will have flash data storage in the fourth quarter of 2009, up from 0.7 percent in the first quarter of 2007.”
The key to the success of the SSD and NAND flash technology is the price development of the flash based memory circuits. In 2003 the price of 1GB NAND flash was 100 times higher than today and up until 2009 they are expected to drop even more. In the end though, it’s the advantages of the flash technology that will be the decisive factor for how many manufacturers that will turn to the technology. The price of flash memory will not be drop below that of mechanical harddrives, when looking at price/capacity, which means that the performance and power consumptions will be the reason(s).
