Flash memory to dominate

Hard disk drive (HDD) solutions will have a small but notable market opportunity in handheld devices over the next few years, but flash memory will continue its dominance in mobile phones, says Earth Times.

The report finds 99% of mobile phones will have a flash memory solution through 2007, dipping to 96% by the end of 2012. This slight shift is due to a small but emerging market for HDD solutions in handheld devices.

"These consumers will require greater storage, and the low cost per gigabyte will carve out a market opportunity in handheld devices for HDD memory," said Parks Associates analyst Chris Roden.

BitMicro has announced a flash memory-based solid state drive (SSD) with wide-ranging capacities of up to 1.6TB, according to Computer World.

The BitMicro E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC delivers more than 55 000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and has a sustained data transfer rate over 230Mbps. By comparison, a fast hard drive, for example, will run at around 300 IOPS.

BitMicro said its new line of SSDs range in storage capacity from 16GB to 1.6TB. The company Web site says it can reach the maximum capacity of 640GB in a 1-in. format, so two-and-a-half 1-in. units would be needed to achieve a 1.6TB capacity.

India and China are expected to be the two main drivers of the 52% increase in IT spending in the Asia Pacific region by 2010, according to a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC), says Business Standard.

This is likely to have its effect on the number of installed enterprise hard disk drive storage devices, expected to quadruple from 2004 to 2010.

Vishal Dhupar, MD of Symantec India, says: "Data volumes are doubling every two years, while storage utilisation rates hover at around 33%. According to a study by CMP Media Research, data is needlessly duplicated by as much as 50-500 times. Consequently, space, power and cooling issues are growing in severity, leading to growing data centre complexities in enterprises."