Scott Davis (Infinio) No 3 Storage Prediction for 2016.

Scott’s third prediction for 2016, relates to hard disk drives and how they will continue to dominate storage market from a capacity perspective.  

Flash Continues to Complement Traditional Spinning Drives, Not Replace Them.

  While the all-flash array market continues to grow in size, and flash decreases in price, the reality of flash production is that the industry does not have the manufacturing capacity necessary to enable flash to supplant hard disk drives. A recent Register article quoted Samsung and Gartner data that suggested that by 2020, the NAND Flash industry could produce 253 exabytes (EB), which is three times the current manufacturing capacity at a cost of approximately $23 billion. The kicker is that 253 EB is only 10 percent of the expected industry storage capacity demand! This article further estimated that $2 trillion (that’s trillion with a “T”) would have to be invested in manufacturing facilities to deliver the amount of flash necessary to meet projected industry storage capacity requirements. Hard drives are far from dead; they will continue to dominate storage from a capacity perspective, further bolstering the case for architectures that separate performance from capacity.