Lord_Majestic - 10:24 am on Aug 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

but it would work adequately for the websites of more than 99% of businesses on the planet.

No it would not because 99% of businesses look at cost rather than speed - most of cheap web hosting deals have either unlimited or many gigabytes of storage offered to each client, if suddenly this storage costs 10 times more than magnetic hard disks that do this job just fine, then flash has no chance.

Correct me if I am wrong but currently production of flash is often done by manufacturers that also make RAM or other chips, and they often juggle production from one type to another depending on costs. This means that production of flash is more or less tied to something that will always be more expensive than disks (per GB) - RAM. I'd say there is no way flash storage will ever compare in price with magnetic disks. It is another matter however that some other interesting technologies are in development that should be much cheaper and faster than flash, but it remains to be seen if they ever have a chance with magnetic disks that have a pretty long roadmap ahead of them.

I am saying this sitting on over 50 TB worth of disks, I dread to think how much it would have cost me if they were flash based - if I had that kind of money I might as well have retired :)