Samsung predicts death of hard drives

Dr. Chang Gyu Hwang, chief guru of all things semi-conductor at Samsung, contends it won't be long until we say sayonara to hard drives completely. We do know he's been sniffing some of that fresh hot
NAND flash memory action, so there's got to be a bit of techno-utopianism going on here — but the density growth on these chips is notably doubling about every twelve months.
So if we see a 32Gb NAND chip by late next year as Samsung claims, that means we'll start to see 64GB flash memory cards for laptops, followed by 128GB cards the following year, and so on. Still, before anyone else gets too punch drunk, we gotta remember the other factors involved here, like the fact that although flash memory isn't subject to the kind of mechanical failures a dropped notebook drive would incur, they've still got a finite read/write life cycle —
not to mention the power consumption and um, cost factors.