Flash drives may topple in price, but surging areal density will keep spinning disks in the lead for years to come, according to research conducted by Samsung, which has a hand in both technological pies.
Currently, flash is $7.50 a gigabyte (with shelf-ready drives ultimately costing more than twice that), while 1.8" spinning disks come in at about $1.40 (with a similar product-making premium.) Of course, standard 3.5" spinning disks are well under 50 cents a gigabyte now, and that's the price you pay at the store.
In three years, however, the picture will be very much different: A gigabyte-worth of 1.8" drive will cost about 60 cents by then, with flash costing between 90 cents and $2.50. By then, however, it looks as if the cost of flash might bottom out, at least according to this shabby photo of a PowerPoint slide. And, it bears remembering that by then, 3.5" hard drives may be pennies per GB.
It doesn't take a genius to see that on the traditional measures of usefulness, capacity and lifespan, flash-based solid-state drives are not competitive in this generation. Buying such a drive is akin to buying high-end SCSI drives. In that case, you get 15,000 RPM for the extravagant price. In flash's case, you get silent, low-power operation, fast sequential reads, and slow-ass writes.
They give a little, they take a little.
SSD prices in freefall -- won't overtake hard disks anytime soon [Engadget]
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