A shift is beginning from the traditional mechanical, spinning disk magnetic media (aka Hard Drive) to solid-state flash memory for mass storage.  There are some serious advantages to using flash memory including performance, power consumption, weight and size.

These are the same memory chips that are in your cell phones, iPOD’s (non-HDD types) and cameras.  Whats changed is the manufactures have gotten better at making them and there are more plants to manufacture the chips.  The hardware manufactures have also gotten on board and are making money selling flash hard drives, so the price is going down (although it is still about 20x more expensive per GB).  These drives are not a fairly standard option for most business class systems for around $200-$500 more.

This will be a big change for the industry and its just starting now.

Karl Weir

Director of Consulting, Globalquest Solutions Inc.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 8:20 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.