Enterprise Flash vs. HDD Projections 2012-2026

The premise of this research is that NAND flash storage will replace the majority of traditional magnetic drives as the primary storage media in enterprise data centers and hyperscale cloud services over the next 10 years. Flash Capacity shipped is projected to grow from 1,000 times less than HDD in 2012, be about equal in 2018, and grow to be about 1,000 more than HDD in 2026.
CIO and senior storage executives should be planning to move from HDDs to NAND flash storage over the next few years, and plan completely different organizational and operational environments. The ability to provide multiple logical views of the same physical data will be a key capability that will significantly simplify data movement and significantly reduce costs. Most magnetic storage for enterprises will be found in distributed cloud services for mainly archive-type applications.


Research Agenda Infrastructure Transformation