tomorrow the weather forecast will be different
Gartner Shmartnet
Gartner has updated its HDD 2012-2017 shipment forecast, and predicts the amount of NAND flash shipped in hybrid drives should increase 163 times in the five years to 2017. But the analyst did not spill the beans on the current level of shipments - nor indeed on how much NAND flash it believes will ultimately be shipped in 2017 …
Gartner struggles with anything changing radically. Their approach tends to underplay any radical movements in the market. The recent decline of the desktop caught them by surprise, for instance.
Reality is the disk market will decline much faster, especially the "high performance" products. Why buy a spinner when SSD is 1000 times faster?
If large "Cloud" server farms are willing to spend massive amounts on arrays of the fastest CPU's available, they probably are unlikely to be too concerned with the price of Flash if the drives are bottle-necking data transfer. Their very existence depends upon speed. That said, the speed of Data Transfer over the Net to the Cloud is the bottleneck. IMO until data transfer rates climb dramatically, then spinners will still sell. I admittedly am not a techie, but am an investor. At what point will the Disk Drives need to be switched to Flash for Cloud applications? In-House servers of course will be flash sooner than later.