Saturday 25th May 2013 1.39am

It's time for my annual Magnetic vs Flash Storage Capacity per Inflation-Adjusted Dollar update including 2013 figures. I've updated the 2012 and 2013 flash figures to include Samsung SSDs where before it was exclusively Intel-only as Intel seem to have stopped bothering to compete in the consumer segment. You'll note that 2013's figures for hard drives are bang on historical trend - the Thai flooding effect is abating. SSD growth in bang for the buck appears to have slammed into a brick wall, with the regressed trend quite flat from 2014 on.

In other words, magnetic storage is going to continue to grow from 2014 onwards, albeit less exponentially, while SSDs increasingly get left behind in storage capacity for the buck. So much for the "SSDs will overtake magnetic by 2014" which I was predicting only in 2008!

I'm going to guess SSDs will become the latency and bandwidth leader via SATA Express while magnetic remains the capacity leader. Who would have thought old rotating magnetic discs will be with us for at least another decade!

Source Excel sheet and raw data can be found at http://nedprod.com/studystuff/SSDsVsHardDrives.xlsx