A leading Intel Fellow explained that SSD "may never" become competitive with normal hard drives in terms of price.

Speaking at this year's IDF San Francisco, Intel's SSD guru, Knut S. Grimsrud, Technology and Manufacturing Group Director of Storage explained that time may be running out for the SSD.

He suggests that the timeframe for SSDs becoming cheaper than traditional spinning platter hard drives - on a price per gigabyte level - is "quite a way off." Grimsrud followed that up by saying that it "may actually never be the case."

"That doesn't mean it's hopeless," he continued. "On a per unit basis I do see that in the very near future SSD can actually be cheaper."

Price per unit more of interest

Grimsrud explained that in terms of usage then you could argue that a cheap, "big enough" SSD would be cheaper than an unnecessarily large hard drive. "On a netbook maybe you don't need a terabyte of storage, maybe all you need is $30 worth of storage."

"The unit price of a big enough SSD could make it interesting even if the $/GB isn't competitive."

He followed that up by talking about when we might actually see large capacity SSDs on the market. "There really aren't any technical barriers to making really big SSDs today, but there are financial barriers because you pay proportional to the capacity."

Prices are coming down relatively. "Costs are scaling really nicely," Grimsrud continued. "You'll notice with each generation you're getting more for roughly the same price."

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing ... z0ziZ3s2dr

I didn't read the whole article, but those two remarks don't really compliment each other.

The act of storing bits on a physical medium, spinning at 7200rpm isn't exactly childs play. Look how long it has taken to increase areal density to 500GB per platter. Now compare that with the speed at which SSD technology is developing.

No, they won't be price competitive, because they will replace mechanical HDDs before the cost per GB is comparable.

I don't think I agree tbh - whilst HDDs are still a better price per gig I don't reckon they'll be completely replaced.

The future is one of each. That way you have speed and cheap storage.

Yes but reliability and performance may make up the difference. Once that happens then disks will have to get larger to survive.

Disks will get larger and they will survive. At least, for quite some time. There will always be a need for high-density high-capacity storage.

In the next few years we will see fewer hard drives in portables and then desktops, but data centres will always need Mega Shed-loads of storage with capacity being more critical than raw performance.

Solid State memory will eventually replaced the electro-mechanical HDDs, but I don't think it will be until we have a truly quantum level technology with incredible density and virtually unlimited read-write cycles. I hope to live long enough to see it, because it always amuses me that computers still have so many moving parts!

Yes there will also be a market at the bottom of the market. Households will probably be on hard drives for at least a decade.