Lower prices put data centers in a better position to buy flash in anticipation of future needs. Early flash storage deployments focused on accelerating I/O-intensive applications, which remain popular candidates for flash storage.ĭeclining costs and increasing density, however, have enabled organizations to extend their use of flash storage from specialized use cases to general enterprise workloads. Here, flash storage adoption continues to expand in the form of enterprise-class all-flash arrays. SSDs have also made their way into the data center in recent years. In computer systems, flash-based SSDs, so called for their lack of moving parts, are prevalent in notebook computers and can also be found in some desktop PCs as a HDD option. At the consumer level, storage devices using flash include USB drives. Indeed, consumer applications have helped propel the growth of the flash technology market.įlash storage, a term often used interchangeably with flash memory, refers to any drive, repository or system using flash memory. Flash memory's small size and power consumption advantages make it well suited for use in on-the-go consumer devices. In the consumer sector, flash memory finds a home in a range of devices, including phones, cameras and tablets to name a few examples. Flash memory is widely used for storage and data transfer.
