NAND flash is taking over the storage market. Currently flash has less than 15 percent of the overall market, but that is rapidly changing as the per-TB cost of flash arrays plunges. In 2012 all-flash and hybrid flash-HDD arrays cost 10 times HHD — $20,000 per TB for flash vs $2,268 for HHD. Today the cost of NAND flash arrays has dropped to about $4,200, while HHD costs have decreased $1,070, reports Wikibon CTO David Floyer in his latest forecast of storage market costs. Meanwhile, the cost of flash storage installed on the memory bus in servers, a.k.a. Server SAN, is on a curve slightly below the cost of HDD arrays at $1,622 per TB in 2012, and HDD Server SAN is practically free at $150 per TB.

By 2020, NAND flash arrays will cost $336 per Tbyte, while HHD arrays will cost $198, Floyer projects. Server SAN flash and HDDs will be at $113 and $35 respectively. That low price for flash Server SAN is a major argument for adopting it more widely, particularly as flash on the memory bus provides the fastest access speeds available. Beyond 2020, the cost of the various choices all approach negligible amounts.

As flash disrupts the storage market, Floyer writes that new storage vendors will put pressure on the traditional market players, accelerating the drop in flash prices even more. SanDisk, for instance, recently announced capacity flash storage at $900 per TB. SanDisk, Samsung, Intel and Micron are all bringing 3D NAND flash into production. “The prospect is 10 terabyte thumb drives!” Floyer writes.

Meanwhile, the growth of flash-based Server SAN will also capture increasing amounts of the growing storage market from traditional SAN, NAS and DAS from below. The result is that the market for magnetic storage, which dominated data storage for decades, will be squeezed into an ever-smaller niche of mainly archival storage. Floyer provides a graphic representation of the future of the storage market in the second figure of his analysis on the Wikibon Web page.

Other solid-state technologies that promise even higher performance than NAND flash and/or higher capacities are also in the wings. Intel and Micron Technology, Inc. have announced a much more expensive but higher performing non-volatile 3D XP technology, for instance. This or other competing technologies may find markets where the difference in performance will provide business value that can justify their higher prices.

However, they are unlikely to gain the volume of sales that can drive the price of these alternative technologies down on anything close to the steep curve NAND flash is riding. That volume is still being driven mainly by the consumer market – smart phones, tablets, thumbdrives, micro-SD cards, GPS systems, etc. Unless the consumer market device makers start switching to one of these new technologies, they will remain too expensive for general storage use in enterprise data centers.

In actual installations, flash is already overtaking HHD in large part because of the huge I/O bandwidth it offers. This supports sharing of a single production database among multiple applications, eliminating the need for multiple database copies and for the extra storage those multiple copies use. Also, the high speed of flash eliminates the need for optimization strategies to gain I/O for high performance needs. These differences make the actual price delta between high speed HHD and flash arrays in practice much lower than a straight comparison of cost per TB implies.

The message clearly is that we are fast approaching the point where flash rather than HDD becomes the default choice for storage, unless some special requirement dictates either HHD or tape, rather than the other way around.

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