History (1997): Storm Products Wants to Replace HDDs by Flash Drives

“Tomorrow’s technology today: flash drives replace hard disk drives,” wrote Storm Products, a division of Clyde Valley Control Systems based in Scotland.

The company, originally a manufacturer of hard disk emulators using flash technology for motherboard testing, is now offering products deriving from these ventures under the name of Storm 2000.

The devices are comparable in appearance to HDDs, but contain flash chips rather than magnetic media and heads.

The new flash drives, which come in ATA-2 and SCSI interfaces, have some major advantages: spin-up time is no longer an issue and the drive is ready within 500ms of powering up, a fact which signifies an enormous gain in the time it takes to boot.

Reliability is also improved, since there are no moving parts; access time is next to nil, transfer time much greater, especially for read; the flash drive’s capacity can easily be increased by additional flash chips; and the devices do not need backup batteries, contrary to RAM disks.

But these advantages come at a cost that cannot be overlooked: Storm has suggested that a 320MB flash drive should cost roughly $7,000, which equates to a per-megabyte cost of $22.

“We are now developing a 1GB flash drive,” announced product sales executive Alasdair Bryson.

The units are likely, nonetheless, to flourish in niche markets for industrial, military and mission-critical applications.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 108, published on January 1997.