Sun Microsystems last week became the latest vendor to put its weight behind solid state disk (SSD) storage technology, pledging to replace spinning hard disks with 2.5in and 3.5in flash disks in many of its servers and corporate storage systems by the end of this year.

Storage giant EMC has already announced plans to integrate SSDs into some of its enterprise-class storage arrays. Samsung is shipping 128GB SSDs to notebook PC manufacturers such as Toshiba, while Intel is reported to be planning a launch of 160GB SSDs later this year. And manufacturers including STEC and SimpleTech are preparing 256GB and 512GB disks.

SSDs offer two advantages over spinning hard disks ­ up to 20 per cent faster data access performance and five times lower power consumption ­ but at up to 20 times the initial purchase cost, according to early estimates.

“Flash is at a price premium right now, but offers significantly better performance, reliability and energy use. But the cost will come down as it becomes used more widely,” said EMC chief executive Joe Tucci in an interview with Computing earlier this year.

Analysts estimate that the per-gigabyte price of SSD storage is falling by 50 to 70 per cent per year, but it could still be five years before it reaches parity with current hard disk prices.

Until then, SSD-based servers are likely to remain the preserve of companies running data-intensive applications such as Oracle or SAP, where the extra performance justifies the cost, or in datacentre environments where dealing with failed hard disks leads to excessive downtime.