Hard Drives Off Memory Lane

Now that movies, music and photos are all going digital, a battle is brewing over where consumers and businesses will store all their stuff.

Traditionally, consumers have stored such files on computer hard drives, but in recent years, flash memory has been gaining ground. Based on semiconductor technology, flash memory is faster, weighs less, and requires less power than traditional hard drives.

Those advantages were demonstrated to the hilt this past year when Apple (AAPL Quote) replaced its hard-drive-based iPod mini, the most popular product in its digital music player line, with the flash-based iPod nano.

With the nano, Apple offered a product that could store essentially the same number of songs in a package a fraction of the size of its predecessor.

If you ask Samsung, flash memory is going to continue its advance. Not only does the electronics giant see the market for flash memory continuing to grow in areas where it already competes, but the company also believes that there's a whole new market for flash in the hard-drive business's traditional home turf: PCs.

The company, which dominates the market for NAND flash, one of two flavors of the storage media, believes that a double-digit percentage of its NAND flash sales will come from PC-related sales within three to five years, Don Barnetson, associate director of flash marketing for Samsung Semiconductor, said in an interview last week at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Barnetson sees uses for flash ranging from stand-alone drives on servers to hybrid drives in desktops that help speed boot-up times and program loading.

Flash is "50 to 500 times faster" than hard-disk drives, making it cost competitive on a price-per-performance basis, Barnetson says.

But don't expect hard-drive makers to just surrender.

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