Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.
Recently, I had an interesting dialog with Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates. Tom is an analyst that covers the storage market including mobile. We were discussing the future of mobile storage. I asked him if he felt that all mobile devices would become flash-based and no longer use hard disk drives.
(For reference, the term “MB” means megabytes or a million characters. The term “GB” means gigabytes or 1,000 MB. And “TB” means terabyte or 1,000 GB.)
Overall, Tom believes that in five years the average notebook PCs will have around 4 TB of storage made up of 3.5 TB of hard disk space and 500 GB of flash used as a front end cache. And, the average smart phone will have 250 GB of flash and the average tablet will have 500 GB of flash storage.
To put this in perspective, Apple Inc.’s largest storage capacity today in the iPhone is 64 GB, and we can expect to see an increase of about 10-times over the next five years. Future hard disk drives will include flash on the front end to quickly process requests for reading and writing as a “front end cache” to the larger HDD storage. The disk drive will sit behind the flash and store huge amounts of data.
There will also be a large increase in the availability of external or removable storage with SD and microSD cards increasing from 32 GB today to over 300 GB, and external hard drives increasing to 4 to 6 TB (2.5-inch drives) and over 10 TB with 3.5-inch drives.
Tom and I both believe that while some information like popular songs may reside in the cloud and simply be streamed to the mobile device, users will always want to have and keep a copy of their information and use it on all of their mobile devices. This makes services such as Unifi (RealNetworks) and SugarSync become more important to keep the user’s content available across all of their mobile devices.
We also believe that user generated high-definition video (and eventually ultra HD video that includes 3D) will be the primary driver for the higher capacity local storage requirements with photos, music and productivity files falling in behind. One thing is certain: future mobile devices are going to have more storage – a lot more – than in the past.
Here is the exchange of e-mails that Tom and I had in December:
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Tom,
After seeing the MacBook Air – sleek, thin and using all solid state flash storage, I wonder if we’ll see all notebooks using only solid state in 4-5 years. Thoughts?
Gerry
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Gerry,
It is likely that in five years, all notebook computers will have flash memory in them. But, it is also very likely that most notebook computers will also have HDDs. We believe that dual storage and hybrid storage solutions in notebooks will be the most popular type.
Tom
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Tom,
The rate of increase in flash capacity and the associated reduction in cost per GB might suggest that users will simply have enough storage and it will all be flash.
Gerry
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Gerry,
By the time most people can afford 1 TB of flash, they will likely be using 20 TB disk drives. HDD still provides a tremendous cost/GB advantage over flash and will for many years to come.
Tom
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Tom,
Are you saying that you feel that flash will remain a 20x price difference per GB? What about the concept of stacking or layering flash chips? SanDisk says it is going to use to put up to 10 layers vertically on a single flash chip.
I think what you’re implying is that notebooks will have very thin form factors with a combination of front-end cache with very fast flash (perhaps 100-500 GB) and have a multi-TB HDD sitting behind it.
Gerry
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Gerry,
There are many technologies for both HDD and flash memory that will increase storage capacity. All of them are hard to do, and it is likely that both may develop more slowly than in the past – although this sort of prediction has proven wrong in the past. There are technologies for increasing HDD areal density and flash storage capacity (like the flash layer stacking) that will keep both technologies increasing capacity over time.
On the other hand, larger inexpensive storage in more things will probably encourage the development of applications that will use that storage, such as a move from today’s HD content to Uutra-HD (up to 8K x 4K pixel video) and perhaps ultra HD in stereo. Ultra HD will likely use hundreds of GB for an hour of content (and this is for the compressed distribution format). This could keep demand for healthy amounts of local storage for many users high.
Thus the best use of flash in some consumer and most computer applications is probably as another layer in the computer storage hierarchy to help deal improve the overall system performance, not to replace the mass storage.
Tom
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Here’s Tom’s contact information:
Thomas Coughlin
Coughlin Associates
www.tomcoughlin.com
408-978-8184
tom@tomcoughlin.com
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D. is Principal Analyst, Mobile & Wireless, MobileTrax L.L.C. As a nationally recognized industry authority, he focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies and market behavior in the mobile computing and wireless data communications industry in North America. Dr. Purdy is an “edge of network” analyst looking at devices, applications and services as well as wireless connectivity to those devices.
