Laptop manufacturers could be on the cusp of replacing hard drives with flash memory, according to the Financial Times. The story claims that a huge spending spree by Toshiba may help lower prices to the point where flash will be low enough to consider it as a replacement for more delicate HDD systems:
While it is highly damaging to short-term margins, the collapse in prices may bring forward to this March a critical pricing point where the per-gigabyte cost of flash memory is only twice that of 1.8-inch laptop-sized hard-disc drive memory.
Yoshiharu Izumi, senior electronics analyst at JPMorgan who expects flash usage to expand rapidly in a wide range of consumer electronics devices, said: "Falling prices of Nand flash memory will transform the laptop PC market, with flash memory increasingly replacing hard-disc memory."
The report rightly points out that flash isn't really that great for desktop systems, where users are used to having far greater space. But although flash has a lot of advantages over a hard disk drive, there are also other, social, trends to consider - such as whether laptop users are already busting for bigger capacities rather than higher expense.
