Is the hard disk moving toward oblivion? What does flash mean for the disk drive business?
Dave: Is the hard disk moving to oblivion because of flash? First of all, absolutely not. Capacity improvements in the disk drive industry actually slowed down for a little while, but they’re back up now with perpendicular recording. Currently, disk drives are improving about as fast as flashes, and they’re improving from a capacity point of view. So, people who need a lot of storage are not going to be using flash any time soon. What is flash good for? Think about the iPod. Some early versions had disk drives spinning in there. The latest generation just has flash. The same thing’s going to happen with the laptop. In fact, I’m running my laptop today–with all my personal data–on flash. Even in the high–end enterprise storage environment, flash will be good for speeding up performance. If you look at flash, it’s about 10 times more expensive than disk. For random access, it’s a hundred times faster. So it makes a lot of sense to incorporate flash into your architecture. In the same way
