Ignoring history again (Score 1)

Sounds like somebody neglected to read The Innovator's Dilemma. Flash drives do not need to become cheaper than hard drives, they simply need to represent enough value for a demographic who are willing to pay a premium for them. This is already happening. There are many systems that do not need more storage space, but do require "lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability". Builders of these kinds of systems will adopt the newer technology, won't care about the storage advantage of hard drives (it has no value for them), and will willingly pay the price premium for the desired features. Anyone care to estimate the cost of a service call on a failed drive? When you factor in the labour (not just the cost to send somebody, but also the cost of having them not available to do something else), the cost of an upset customer (taking up time calling in to complain, having endless meetings about what went wrong, etc), the damage to your reputation (a tough thing to measure, but potentially very expensive), and so forth, the actual price of the drive itself is not a significant part of the equation. Solid state devices have always tended to have a reliability advantage over anything with moving parts, and people will pay a premium for reliability, especially where said reliability will reduce costs overall. Hard drives also consume a lot of power, and in many cases aren't actually doing anything but sitting there spinning, since everything is happening in RAM. There are many PCs and servers out there that barely use their hard drive. It loads the relevant app into RAM, and it's job is done. Still, there it sits, spinning away, generating heat (that needs to be cooled), and eating power to no purpose. As the cost of electricity continues to climb, the long term costs of this may in fact prove the flash drive to be cheaper overall, despite the initial price difference. Ignoring flash altogether, there are a whole host of new storage technologies being explored that will produce neither flash drives nor hard drives. While prognostication is always dangerous, it seems not too much of a stretch to imagine that some of these will become reality in the next decade, rendering both hard drives and flash drives obsolete. Reading that article, I am left with the impression that those researchers give a strong impression of having their heads in the silicon . . . er . . . sand.