“The history of flash dates to 1984, when Toshiba invented the technology. The chips, which retain data when a device’s power is switched off/
“EMC, NetApp, and Hewlett-Packard are mostly dependent on spinning magnetic disks, which require more energy and space, for their storage products. All three are branching out into flash, partly through acquisitions. EMC, the largest of the storage vendors, is projected to post sales growth this year of 5.8 percent, the slowest since 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Note: “Driving the migration to flash, in the form of so-called solid-state drives, is the desire by companies to put the explosion of data to use more quickly.”
solid-state drive
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
("have no moving (mechanical) components. This distinguishes them from traditional electromechanical magnetic disks such as hard disk drives (HDDs) or floppy disks, which contain spinning disks and movable read/write heads"/ have lower access time, and less latency; most SSDs use NAND-based flash memory, which retains data without power)