At the 2013 CES conference as well as the 2013 Storage Visions Conference flash memory was finding more homes. Hybrid HDDs are getting beefier flash memory caches. Toshiba won a visionary award for their Hybrid HDD. Micron announced a TB SDD for $600, Plexstor announced a new line of client SSDs and Kingston was showing a 1 TB USB stick (although at a higher price). More on these below.

Toshiba was awarded a Visionary product award at SV 2013 for its MQ01ABDH hybrid HDD. The company expects that about half of all 2.5-inch storage products shipped into the notebook market to be hybrid HDDs by 2015.   The company is working on its next generation of hybrid HDD product.

WD is reported to be giving samples to its OEM customers of hybrid HDDs with much larger flash memory capacity than in earlier models. The company has developed a 500 GB 2.5-inch HDD with 500 GB of HDD capacity and 24 GB of NAND. This product has a 5mm thickness. The company was also showing a 1 TB 2.5-inch HDD that is 7mm thick and has a 24 GB NAND cache. These products are intended for the ultra-thin notebook computer market

Seagate had a technology demonstration at their hotel suite in the CES where they were showing a 7mm thick 2.5-inch hybrid drive with 500 GB HDD and 32 GB flash memory capacity. Seagate was also showing a 1 TB 2.5-inch hybrid drive that was 9.5mm thick and with a 32 GB flash cache.

Hybrid HDDs combine lower storage capacity costs close to those of HDDs with read and write performance that can be about 80% of that possible with the best client SSDs. Using a hybrid HDD it will be possible to create ultra-thin notebook computers with larger storage capacity and with a price of less than $600. Lower prices could make hybrid HDD (or dual storage with both a HDD and an SSD) storage the highest volume ultra-thin notebook computers. Higher flash capacity also offers the possibility that the OS and applications can be stored on the flash memory allowing faster system operation and booting.

Micron announced an SSD with almost 1 TB storage capacity for consumer (client) applications. The price of this product on a $/GB basis is less than average SSD prices.. The Crucial M500 has user storage capacities of 960 GB for a price of $599 (about $0.60 per GB, which can be compared to <$0.10 per GB for 2.5-inch HDDs). The drive is available in ultrathin formats that can fit into a very thin notebook computer. Sequential read and write speeds are 500 MB/s and 400 MB/s respectively.

Plexstor introduced its M5M SSD in an mSATA format intended for thin notebook computers. The products have storage capacities from 64 GB to 256 GB using a Marvell controller. Read data rates are 540 MB/s and write data rates increase with storage capacity up to 430 MB/s. The device includes 256-bit AES encryption . Price and availability information were not available.

Kingstron was showing many flash memory products at the CES show but a particularly interesting product was their 1 TB USB flash drive.. The Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator will be available with 512 GB and 1 TB storage capacity. The 512 GB version is now available at a price of $898 and it was rumored that the 1 TB drive will sell for about $1,700. Obviously these will be premium flash memory products.

Flash memory is the backbone of modern mobile consumer devices and the higher performance and ruggedness of this storage technology make it attractive for computer application as well. USB flash drives are increasing in capacity, although 1 TB will not be a normal capacity for many years. Flash memory in notebook computers will become more common, either alone or perhaps more commonly, in combination with HDDs to increase overall system performance.