Analyst: flash memory hurts HDD market

Research firm The Information Network indicates hard disc drives (HDD) continue to lose market ground to flash memory technologies, and the trend will continue in the foreseeable future.

"The HDD market already lost the battle in the small form factor market such as MP3 and cameras to solid-state drives and risk further erosion in the 2.5-in. enterprise space," The Information Network President Robert Castellano said.  "The major bright spot for hard disc drives is the 2.5-inch laptop market, and even there solid-state products are on the market that are slowly nibbling away at their dominance."

Fujitsu is looking to spin off its HDD storage business, and the company has put it up for sale to the highest bidder.  The demise of Fujitsu’s HDD storage unit leaves only a select group of companies still working in the sector, including Seagate and Western Digital. 

SSDs are seen as the storage medium of the future, but the price per gigabyte is still extremely too high for casual consumers.  CDFreaks recently published an article explaining how RunCore introducing low-cost SSDs, though the read/write speeds are significantly lower than the more expensive SSDs.

"The oversupply of flash memory, which has hurt the semiconductor industry in 2008 will hurt the hard disc drive market in 2009."

Indeed, flash manufacturers have seen declining prices, with Toshiba, SanDisk and other companies relying heavily on NAND flash suffering.  Toshiba said NAND prices fell 45 percent from April to September, and expects the company’s profits to drop a whopping 60 percent next March.  The NAND price drop, according to manufacturers, was steep and rather unexpected, and shows no signs of letting up.