Q&A: Why Apple's co-founder is hot on solid state storage

You want to get a little data from here to there, but you don't want to go through extra chips, extra parts, extra pieces. That's unreliability. The number of pins and connections you have is more related to reliability than the overall number of transistors these days.

I also like the fact that you just plug a board into a computer. I'm one of these guys that doesn't like to see bundles and bundles of cables. You know, where does this one go, and did I plug that one in the right way? Then you have to test both ends of it. It becomes a mess. I've got racks of equipment in my home and I don't like that. It's an overall mess that you look at and think, this scares away the common person. It scares away a child. I really believe that when you make something so simple that anyone can look at it and understand it, it even makes it easier for the engineers to understand what's going on where. That was one of the big things that turned me toward Fusion-io - using this form factor compared to the solid state disk approach.

Do you see a day when solid state storage will kick all spinning disk out of the data center? No. I don't see it kicking all spinning disks out. In computers we have so many tiers of storage for cost efficiency. Even when you have a hard disk drive it has its own cache built into it. Then we have caching systems in operating systems. Then we have different speeds of memory from your RAM to your L1, L2, L3 caches. This is an in-between one, but I think it's going to be huge - a lot bigger than people think. It cost more money per bit to create NAND flash ... [but] in a lot of places kick out spinning storage. I can see certainly in a netbook you don't want spinning storage. If you're talking 64GB or less, it's less expensive to have flash solid state disk now.

But in a big enterprise-class data center there are huge amounts of data that aren't accessed very often. It's just mathematics. You take stuff that's not accessed very often, it can be accessed slowly. And then you bring it into a faster form of storage when it is being used a lot.

So I can see solid state storage in the enterprise as a type of cache, without the same programming and design structure as cache, but serving that same purpose.