The other day, I realized that I was surrounded by “gigs of flash”. Each one of these gadgets contains one gigabyte of Flash RAM:
- Casio Exilim S600 camera
- Kodak P850 camera
- AT&T (HTC) 8525 cell phone
- Sony PSP
- Apple iPod Nano
- Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
- Nintendo Wii
Of course these seven “gigs” are packaged in five different form factors… And why a gig? For a camera or an MP3 player, 1GB means “big enough that the battery will die before you fill it up or listen to it all”. In many cases 1GB represented the “knee of the curve”, the best price-performance at the time.
The interesting question for me is when 120GB of flash is going to become price-competitive with a 120GB hard disk. Today you can get a 5400rpm 120GB disk for $80-100, quantity one. The first generation of plug-compatible flash replacements are still pretty expensive ($350 for 32GB), but the price per megabyte for flash seems to be dropping by around 65% per year, so we won’t have to wait long. In view of the benefits (reduced heat, better battery life, significantly better performance, robustness, etc.) I’d be happy to pay $300 for a 120GB replacement for my present laptop HDD.