Crave Talk: How flash will destroy optical and magnetic storage

By Nate Lanxon on 21 January 2008, 11:53am

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Dying formats
Music's part in this pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy -- with the optical disc playing the lead role -- is somewhat obvious. On-demand music -- even lossless music -- is gathering great pace in the market, and the job of the CD will ultimately be called into question. Many people already use flash drives to take an album they (legally) downloaded to a friend's house, and I see this being the case with both HD movies and HD games.

I'm not even going to mention how easy it would be for computer software to be exclusively delivered on-demand or via small flash drives. There's also the advantage that expensive software -- we're talking industrial CAD stuff for example, not just Photoshop -- can be better protected against piracy when distributed on flash. Rather than using a DVD and a user-inputted serial number, software can require an original disk (read: flash drive) be in place (read: in the USB port) for an install to take place.

Future formats
The other major player in this discussion is the hard disk, which is still required -- alongside the progression of on-demand, download-to-own media consumption and broadband penetration -- in order to vanquish the optical disc. But once optical media is out of the picture, flash will ultimately attack HDDs, its previous sidekick. As we saw earlier, flash-based SSDs are already beginning to encroach on the HDD territory, and it will continue to fight aggressively. As flash adoption becomes greater, prices will fall and SSDs will be viable replacements of HDDs.

However, while flash will eventually dominate the space currently taken by DVDs, HD discs and CDs, there are a couple of areas that it will never dominate until vastly significant advances are made.

Format problems
A PC's RAM is extraordinarily fast now, and outstrips the common flash drive in a heartbeat. Its speed is crucial to the performance of a computer and, although products like Windows Vista's ReadyBoost compliment it, it does just that: compliment, not replace. The same is true for enterprise HDDs -- their incredible data transfer speeds are paramount to their successes as relentlessly fast data storage solutions.

Finally, cost is a factor -- a small flash drive is not as cheap to manufacture as a CD. But if 95 per cent of software was distributed online, 5 per cent on flash, would it matter? The finite number of erase/write cycles of flash memory may pose as an issue within industrial environments. But a) does Average Joe care, and b) these are things that should advance with a little more time.

The bottom line is that flash may replace optical media, and, with the help of better on-demand, download-to-own solutions and faster broadband, it'll co-operate with HDD to eliminate the HDD. -Nate Lanxon