IBM Fellow Steve Hetzler predicts sales of Flash-based drives will not represent more than 1% of the $35 billion disk drive market until 2012.
Makers of solid-state drives using flash-memory chips will need more resources than they command to take over the $35 billion hard disk drive market, despite the current hype behind their prospects.
Speaking at an IDEMA’s symposium in Milpitas, IBM Fellow Steve Hetzler used a scientific technique dubbed the “Chasm Analysis” to prove his point.
He claimed solid-state drives (SSDs) will remain less than 1 percent of the market until 2012.
“The flash-memory makers, like Sandisk or Samsung, will need the size of a government bailout – about $1 trillion – to build the hundreds of factories needed to provide enough chips to make enough solid-state drives to entirely displace hard disks in the market,” he said at the event on non-volatile storage, particularly NAND flash.
Hetzler’s analysis concludes that all the semiconductor capacity in the world could produce only 12 percent of the solid-state drives needed to satisfy the $35 billion disk drive market.
“It’s nuts,” he said. “Nobody in their right mind would take a $280 billion semiconductor industry to make SSDs, that they in turn would sell for only $4 billion. It’s never going to happen.”
To capture just 1 percent of the hard-disk-drive market, flash-memory makers would have to increase their capacity by 40%, which in these troubled economic times is unlikely.
“Even if disk drives companies decide to stop increasing the density and the capacity of disk drives today, it will take more than 10 years for their flash competitors to catch up because of the capital investment,” Hetzler said.
Interesting insight. Maybe it can stay as an enterprise only product. For example, the hyperdrive5,http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/.
Something like this would do wonders for database systems.