eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
1Demand Drivers Indicate Good Long-term Growth
With 222 million iOS units already sold and 1.1 billion flash-enabled smartphones (a 240 percent growth rate growth over five years) expected to be in use worldwide by 2015, “these staggering numbers are starting to affect the population of the world,” SanDisk CTO Yoram Cedar said in his keynote address on Aug. 9.
2Predictable Supply of Flash for Next Five Years
3Mobile Catching Up With Enterprise Flash Deployments
4Tablets Came From Nowhere, Now Theyre Where Its At
Two years ago, there was barely a mention of tablets as a market that would become a major player, but by 2015 there will be about 327 million of them moving NAND flash-based bits around the world. That represents a 500 percent growth spurt over six years (2010 to 2015) representing 15 percent of all flash-based storage.
5Enterprise SSDs Also Looking at Big-Time Growth in Next Five Years
6Significant Storage in Removable Devices
7NAND Flash Continues as a Disruptive Player in Storage
8Jumbo Storage in Phones Cannot Be Done Without Flash
9Social Networking Pushing More Use of Flash
With all the on-demand texting, emailing, snapshot photos and videos and music being posted to sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Chatter, Yammer and YouTube, users of flash-enabled smartphones and tablets are already spoiled about how fast they can post all this information. Speed is flash’s main stock in trade, and once a user has it, it’s tough to change to anything else—unless that “anything else” is even faster.
103D RAM on the Drawing Boards
At this point, going from flat chips to three-dimensional chips—similar to what Intel is doing with its processor chips—is a work in progress and has been for a few years, but the promise is that it will scale incredibly well and cause a major breakthrough in NAND flash capacity. This is still several year away, however.