Study predicts majority of laptops to have Flash drives by 2009

Computer industry market research firm iSuppli has released a new report that forecasts technology penetration in both the laptop and desktop sectors over the next few years.
One of the more unusual predictions made by the report is that by 2009, more than 60 percent of laptops will feature some sort of flash-based storage.
Today, only 0.7 percent of laptops come with flash drives. However, increasing capacity and decreasing cost of flash storage over the next few years may change this number significantly. iSuppli noted that in 2003, purchasing 1GB of flash memory was over 100 times more expensive than the equivalent cost per gigabyte for a traditional hard drive. However, it expects that this ratio will fall to only 14 times by 2009, leaving flash memory as a viable option for certain configurations. By the end of that year, up to 24 million, or 60 percent, of all laptops sold per quarter will come with flash storage.

iSuppli noted that flash technology can offer faster seek times than hard drives as well as being far more shock-resistant, an important factor for mobile use. In addition, flash drives can be manufactured in smaller enclosures than hard drives and consumer less electrical power. Already flash storage has captured the majority of the MP3 player market for these last three reasons.

Hard drives are unlikely to disappear from laptops entirely, of course, as they will continue to provide more bang-for-the-buck in terms of data storage, and hard drive technology is continuing to improve. Currently, flash becomes prohibitively expensive in larger configurations: 16GB cards are more than twice as expensive as 8GB ones, for example. However, once affordable 250GB flash drives become available, it's hard to imagine how they couldn't be considered adequate for all kinds of laptop configurations. iSuppli predicts that the transition from hard drives to flash drives will still be ongoing in 2009, with most laptops sporting combination drives rather than being flash-only.

Chip maker Intel is already preparing for the transition, as the company announced its first ever flash memory drives back in March of this year.