Hard disk drive (HDD) vendors are spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to discourage their customers from moving to flash storage for low-latency data, the value of which is measured is time-to-access rather than cost-per-terabyte. These vendor luddites claim that flash is too expensive and that the dramatic decrease in cost-per-TB of flash will soon level off, that flash cannot be further improved and will soon be replaced by a next-generation storage technology, and that flash wears out in months. None of these are true, writes Wikibon CTO David Floyer in “The Status of Flash for Practitioners.”

The truth is that flash prices will continue to tumble, driven mostly by the huge demand for flash in consumer products, where 85% of flash ends up. Flash is replacing spinning disk in PCs and is the default storage medium for tablets, including the Microsoft Surface and Apple iPad, which are increasingly replacing laptops in the consumer market. Toshiba Corp. is already in large-scale production of 3D flash, which promises huge increases in storage capacity, and Intel/Micron Technology, Inc. have already announced 3D XP storage, the next step in flash. Reliability issues have been completely solved by sophisticated flash controller software, which is standard in the products sold by PCIe and SSD vendors.

Flash is still more expensive than HDD per TB. However, its high input/output rates, which support using logical copies to replace almost all of the multiple physical copies of production databases common today, plus the sophisticated de-duplication software provided with flash arrays, reduces that cost delta to nearly zero for most latency data uses. As a result, Floyer writes, IT organizations should minimize or eliminate their investment in performance HDD for low-latency data, including all data accessed regularly by users, in favor of flash. HDDs will continue to find a market in capacity storage for data that must be kept but is seldom used, into the next decade. However, lower cost flash is already starting to appear in the capacity market.

The full analysis, which includes a look at the various high end flash technologies available from EMC and other vendors, is available on the Wikibon Web site.

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