Will these people ever learn not to release studies like this?
In addition, flash memory technology will reach technical limits that will prevent its continued scaling before 2020, keeping them from replacing HDDs.
We are already seeing SSDs being adopted by a number of major manufacturers in the laptop and netbook markets. Sizes of SSDs are increasing rapidly. Costs are decreasing even with only 2 real controller players in the consumer market currently (Intel and Indilinx). There isn’t a conventional magnetic hard drive on the market that can touch SSDs from a performance standpoint. Maybe hard drives will be the cheapest on a per TB basis in 2020, but nobody is going to care. Note, I am not saying that hard drives will disappear by 2020. When you need a lot of storage, good old hard drives are likely going to be the way to go. However for primary storage, there is no way you should be using a hard drive in 2020. Right now, buying a good SSD is the best upgrade you can buy for your PC. If you don’t believe me, look at this fine article on AnandTech. If SSDs aren’t the answer, it will be something else that isn’t a hard drive.