How Low Will the Price of Flash Memory Decrease?

[DemonDragonJ]

Currently, traditional mechanical hard drives typically cost only $0.05 to $0.10 per gigabyte, which is a very low price, while flash memory-based devices typically cost as high as $1.00 per gigabyte, or even higher, which is a massive difference in price. Thankfully, the prices of flash memory have been gradualy decreasing (as they were once several dollars per gigabyte), and some devices, such as Samsung's 840 EVO series, have reached $0.60 per gigabyte, but I am wondering how much lower the prices can decrease.

Obviously, I do not believe that the price of flash memory will ever be as low as five or ten cents per gigabyte, but may it eventually decrease to a mere $0.25 per gigabyte? That would be very reasonable and affordable, in my mind, although still slightly higher than the cost of magnetic memory.

What does everyone else say about this? How low shall the price of flash memory decrease, and how long may it take for that to occur?

[Stonerboy779]

It would be nice to accurately predict it but I dont think it is possible to do so. I believe as manufacturing becomes more streamlined and as technology advances we will see low low prices under the 50c/GB, hopefully under the 20c/GB but there will always be the faster storage costing more.

[Airbozo]

Right now, the large HDD manufacturers are busy purchasing the assets needed to move forward and stay in business. IBM (ok they don't manufacture drives...), purchased Texas Memory Systems (arguably the leader in the field), there was a bidding war between Seagate and Western Digital for Virident (one of my customers) and despite the fact that Seagate has an enormous amount of money invested in Virident, WD won. That leaves the next in line company, Fusion IO (another one of my customers) which is a merger of Fusion IO and IO Turbine (both were customers). Another player in the field, Violin Memory Storage is still in play, but will not be had cheap. They are really considered the #1 or #2 player in the field and currently IBM's Flash Storage Systems only real competitor.

Once the dust settles I expect to see prices start dropping. Will it ever go as low as HDD prices per GB? Probably not, but then again look how long it took drive prices to get to where they are. When I first started in the electronics field I was fixing 512 MB HDD's that were the size of a blade system (7U) and they cost around $25k. The bottom platter was reserved for diagnostics and alignment tracks and everything in that unit was replaceable or repairable (including the heads and motors). The very first field job I had was repairing a Solid State Disk Drive unit manufactured by Storage Tek back in the early 80's and it was slightly larger than 2 full racks and probably less than 2gb. It cost over a million dollars and required constant power and support.