Flash clashes with mechanical hard drive realities

SEAGATE IS quietly shipping review copies of an 8GB capacity one-inch hard drive to the media. Packaged in a handy CF flash format to slip into a digital camera, the ST1 series hard drive is a nice way to store a lot of photos or music if it's incorporated into a MP3 player or phone. One web site, here, is listing the 8GB model at $249. Meanwhile, 8 GB of CF flash memory can be had through Froogle between $550 and $700, depending on if you want a generic or name-brand product and where you buy it. Do the sums, and it's roughly two to three times the cost for flash than a mini hard-drive.

It remains to be seen if one-inch drives will have a sustained presence in the marketplace over the long run. Sure, there's a short-term crunch in NAND, but there's always a short-term crunch in any suitable chip technology until the factor lines get cranking and prices start plummeting. Apple, the biggest buyer of mini-storage, has made multi-year commitments to multiple flash memory manufacturers so it can feed its smaller Ipods.

Flash memory is more tolerant of environment extremes of temperature and shock than most typical one-inch drives and is also much easier to package in smaller form factors. Finally, Intel, SanDisk and other flash manufacturers would like to capitalise on the ever-hungry demand for flash and would prefer not to give up market share to drive manufacturers, so they are likely to cut every deal they can to put flash into anywhere a one-inch drive might appear.

Life is a little better at the next size up, with 2.5 inch drives likely to be in popular demand for the "stock" Ipod/Palm Pilot form factor. With Toshiba and others planning to roll out 80 GB drives in this form factor, there's likely to be a lot of growth in the hand-held market for both audio and video, especially since everyone is piling onto the portable-video bandwagon.

More importantly, portable DVD manufacturers are going to wise-up and realize they can take their existing (larger screen) designs and slip a 2.5 hard drive on-board for "stow and go" playing. After all, there are only so many vanilla DVD players they can sell before they have to offer an upgraded version. And there's always room for more storage and lighter weight in the laptop community.

Life gets really interesting at the 3.5 inch hard drive level . What do you do after you've sold everyone a terabyte or two of disk storage? It's likely you'll start to see drive manufacturers move from their current trend of external and network attached storage to an off-the-shelf package of network-attached RAID, so that people can have transparent low-cost fault-tolerant storage of the family photo albums and video.

Drive manufacturers are also making noises about building hybrid drive schemes that would use a combination of flash memory and hard disk storage to speed up boot time. ExtremeTech reports that the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association aired papers from Intel and Microsoft to use flash to speed up response time and save energy by holding frequently accessed system info in a non-volatile cache. After all, spinning up the drive to find and move some bits burns some juice. If drive manufacturers want to get ahead of the curve, they might take matters into their own hands and replace their current RAM caches with a flash version or a mix of flash and RAM. µ