Highlighting The Latest Flash Tech At FMS23

The flash storage industry has evolved in the past couple of years even as the spinning hard disk industry continues to shrink.

Dublin, Ireland-based research firm Research and Markets this year estimates the enterprise flash storage market to show a cumulative annual growth rate of nearly 14 percent between 2023 and 2029 as businesses continue to ditch hard disk drives for SSDs and other flash storage medium.

In the meantime, hard-drive sales are plummeting. Top hard-drive manufacturer Seagate, for instance, in July reported fiscal fourth quarter 2023 hard-drive shipments fell 41 percent in terms of total capacity while average capacity per drive fell 18 percent. And rival Western Digital reported fiscal fourth quarter 2023 hard-drive shipments of 11.8 million units, down from last year’s 16.5 million units.

[Related: Storage Vendors Evolve With The Times: 2023 Storage 100]

It’s enough to make one wonder just how long the hard-drive industry can survive.

Indeed, Charles Giancarlo, CEO of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Pure Storage, which manufactures hardware and software centered on all-flash storage, recently told CRN that he expects the last hard drive to be sold within the next five years given that price on a per-Gigabyte basis of flash storage is already lower than that of spinning disk and is falling much faster.

That spells opportunity for the flash storage and flash memory industry, which in mid-August held its annual Flash Memory Summit. Flash Memory Summit 2023, or FMS23, brought together developers large and small of chips, software, SSDs, storage systems and related products to show their latest wares and claim their stake in the fast-growing flash storage industry.

CRN has collected new product information from 12 of those vendors ranging from small chip-focused developers like XConn and Phison to the largest SSD makers like Samsung and Solidigm. Here is a look at what to expect from this dynamic industry.