Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst at the company, said the shift to flash is being aided and abetted by a dramatic drop in prices for NAND memory.
He said that 1GB of NAND flash cost nearly 100 times more than hard drive storage in 2003, but by 2009 the gap between prices will be more like 14 times.
But it's not just price that will drive its use, said Wilkins. The use of memory gives better performance than rotating storage because of its faster read times. It also has better shock resistance and offers superior reliability to HDDs, he added.
The three types of flash storage currently slated all offer better performance than conventional HDDs - those are Intel's "Robson", hybrid HDDs, and solid state drives.
Half of laptops to have SSD by Q4 2009
Posted on Monday, May 07 2007 @ 6:38 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Research firm iSuppli predicts that by the end of 2009, more than 50 percent of all notebooks sold will have a solid state disk (SSD) instead of a mechanical hard drive.