That's interesting, because for a long time HDD price/MB was halving
every year, which means capacity/year was almost doubling (part of the
price drop was production efficiencies). Is flash price/MB dropping
_faster_ than by a factor of 2 every year, or has the long-term HDD
trend slowed so that flash can catch up? Both? ;-)
I think the more important issue is that many consumers are buying
more and more towards the trailing edge of hard drives. Personally I
always used to buy at about the half-size point, ie when 80GB drives
were the biggest drives around, I would buy a 40GB drive. When 160GB
drives were the biggest I would pick up an 80GB drive. Now I'm
looking at more like the 1/3rd size point, ie my next drive will
probably only be a 120GB or maybe 160GB drive while manufacturers are
now turning out 400GB drives.
In business machines I see this trend even more strongly. By far the
most common hard drive size in new business computers is 40GB, the
smallest size offered. If they could get a 20GB drive for $10 less I
suspect that a lot of businesses would go that route. I'm sure that
most hard drive manufacturers would probably LOVE to discontinue their
40GB drive production since that's only half a platter (or less) for
them, ie the "40GB" drives they are really 80GB+ drives with most of
the capacity disabled. Certainly we've seen this before with drives
to support old products (ie the hard drives sold in Microsoft's XBox
have to be the same 10GB size now as they were some MS first signed
the contract with drive manufacturers), but to see it in new,
mainstream products is something fairly new.
In short, the thing that really changed is the rate at which us
consumers require more hard drive space. Both flash and hard drives
are increasing in size faster than our requirements are. The trick
here is that both flash and hard drives have a bottom end price point.
Bellow a certain size there is just no real price advantage. For hard
drive manufacturers the cost savings bellow 1 platter (ie 80 to 133GB
right now) is rather negligible. For flash the minimum price point is
the cost for a single chip at the lowest cost/MB, which right now is
probably around 256 or 512MB, and this cost is much lower than the
minimum cost for hard drives.
As the articles notes, the crossover point between where flash becomes
cheaper than hard drives is increasing every year, and it's doing so
faster than the annual increase in drive size that consumers want.
Eventually that means that flash will become cheaper than hard disks
for the drive size that many people are buying. That being said
though, I see the timeframe for this cross-over as being roughly 10
years down the road. They at least have to get to the point where a
40GB flash drive is cheaper than a 40GB hard drive, and that will take
time.
