Ever since flash took the storage world by storm, people have been watching this space as a hotbed of disruption. There has been all sorts of speculation about what technology will jump out next and overtake flash — all this while disks are still blissfully spinning on racks all over the world. Let’s have some straight talk on the present and future state of storage, shall we?

Scott Shadley, principal technologist at Micron Technology, Inc., sat down with John Furrier (@furrier) and Marc Farely (@gofarley), host and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the VMworld 2016 conference. He set out to dispel some of the urban legends currently making the rounds in the tech community.

Myth #1: Disks are dead

“Spinning disks in certain applications and in certain use models or certain types of drives is going to die. There’s not enough silicon in the world today for flash to take over 100 percent of our sockets,” Shadley said. He stated that flash is currently replacing disk at a rate of five to 15 percent per year.

Myth #2: All flash is not economical

It depends. In the case of public cloud: “If you’re going to a colocation facility, you’re paying for floor tile and for power. That’s all they care about as far as metrics and how they bill you,” Shadley said. “If you have to put in four racks to get spinning media in that system — or you have to put in one rack, because flash media is so much faster, I saved you three floor tiles of space. That will pay the disks back in less then six months.”

Myth#3: NVMe will kill flash any day now

Shadley said that while Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) is impressively fast, in the real world it presents problems with capacity and performance matching.

“The VSAN architecture existing today can’t take true advantage of that, because it wasn’t designed around NVMe architecture,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE