Flash forward

Burgess: New storage technologies cannot be ignored by a channel hoping to survive

Memory storage has become a ubiquitous part of our lives. Traditionally restricted to the office, it has now infiltrated our home lives through the use of mobiles, MP3 players, games consoles and digital cameras.

In fact, I’d bet a lot of money that everyone knows at least one person who got a Christmas present that involves some kind of memory storage capability. This will help drive the memory storage market ever onwards and upwards.

First introduced to the market in 2002, flash memory became popular in 2004 for MP3 players. Previously, flash was mainly used in cameras and prices were high. With improvements in the technology and mass adoption, prices have fallen rapidly and, along with increased capacity, have become the focus of competition within the market.

Over the next few months we will see storage sales continue to be driven by price and size. For example, average stick capacities have recently doubled in size from 4GB to 8GB and that trend is expected to continue.

If resellers and distributors want to take advantage of this growing market, they should concentrate on new products based on flash – such as solid-state drives (SSDs) and eSata drives – and less on optical media, which is diminishing as a storage medium.

SSDs are predominantly used by professionals and the usual gadget-mad, early-adopter consumers.

The biggest barrier to mass adoption is the consumer belief that it is difficult to open a laptop and swap the traditional hard disk for SSD.

Demand will be created by resellers that like to bring innovation to their customers.

Such retailers will push back on manufacturers and distributors for new storage media, enabling a deeper understanding of quality and attracting more consumers to the products.

Manufacturers will follow demand by producing more product. It’s understandable that distributors and those retailers that follow the crowd are nervous about flash.

The credit crunch may affect the quantity of high-end products bought in the short term, but as long as laptops and other consumer devices evolve – which they will – people will migrate to flash.

All of us will increasingly rely on memory and look for size, ease of access and security.

It has even been suggested by one industry giant that in five years' time, we will be using memory storage so much that forgetting will become a thing of the past.

It is true that portable storage devices and miniature recording devices are already available in offices and homes.

Our flash-based USB memory sticks may even become our set of keys to the office, house and car.

It is difficult to predict exactly what we will all be using in five years’ time to store our data, as technology is developing rapidly.

I expect SSD will become common. Combined with a thinner, faster, lighter design, SSDs will appeal to businesses and consumers requiring high-capacity data storage.

If channel members don’t wake up to the shift in storage patterns then, like vinyl, they’ll be collecting dust on the shelf.

Joanne Burgess is account manager for UK & Ireland at Traxdata