When will SSDs be more common than HDDs?

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Current year 2013:
Crucial 960GB M500 SSD = £485.40

Which year will it cost:
Crucial 960GB M500 SSD = £48.54

will it be 10 years or 20 years time?

Probably another 5 years or so. I remember a few years ago a 128 SSD ran about $700 US, and the technology was still pretty dodgy. The prices have gone down a bit, and the quality has improved, so it's basically folloing the path of Moore's Law. --Then too, back then a 500 GB Seagate cost about $140, and now the same drive costs about $50, and a 1TB drive costs about $90, and these are 2.5" notebook drives, not 3.5" Desktop drives, which are even cheaper.

Agreed!

Are large flash drives stable?

It seems like we might be shifting toward HDD/SSD hybrids where SSD is a working cache memory.

Also, if Phase Change Memory works commercially it could be a game changer. It's been in testing a long time, but might surge paste Flash Memory.

Hit me with a bad example: What difference would Phase Change Memory make on a device like the Wii-U, despite its other awful technological shortcomings and hilariously low power base?

Intel has an Enterprise grade SSD that claims a read write lifetime of several petabytes, so yeah, but unfortunately these cost A LOT more than their regular grade SSD's.

AFAIK if you want to get one, Intel is the way to go. Others may have faster performance, but the Intel's by far the most stable of them all.

SSD will replace HDD in time, but it'll probably be longer than we'd like to believe. I use a SSD/HDD hybrid system, and it works like a charm, though. It boots faster than a conventional HDD system, but still offers plenty of space.

I don't know if I'd ever trust an SSD for long-term applications. Why?

EMP.

War is inevitable. Natural disasters happen. SSDs are vulnerable. HDDs too, but I'd want to know what an EMP would do to a POWERED DOWN SSD as compared to a HDD. I know magnetic media isn't affected by the pulse itself. RAM memory, though, might be scrambled.

I do envision SSDs being the mainstay for fast-access data for on-demand booting and fast loading applications, but HDDs are king for mass storage and stability.

Actually, magnetic tapes are still used for backups of critical data many places when it comes to off-site storage, as they are even more durable than hard drives. Maybe SSD will never be used for backup, but it will probably replace hard drives completely in 10-15 years for regular consumers. I doubt that the US will be hit by an EMP bomb anytime soon, though.

This should give you an idea.

If an EMP bomb goes off, (essentially an exoatmospheric thermonuclear warhead with a yield of 5+ MT yield) I think there will be bigger thing to worry about than the data on my hard drive, which in the case of a nuclear exchange will most likely be trivial compared to everything else.

True, but many thinkers are worried about the pitfalls of a "digital age." Technology that can't withstand a wide variety of natural and man-made disasters is really of limited use. Imagine how much knowledge and data will be forever lost because it was never stored in a durable medium.

A computer otherwise not affected by an EMP will still work once you get the power back on, but if the data storage unit get corrupted, you won't be able to recover the contents.

Tru-dat, Honestly I prefer to use SSD's as soft-esque ROMS and just try to write as little to them as possible, make em last, while using a high RPM drive for frequently used stuff and then a big 7200 as a data dump.

Besides, if worried about EMP, just keep it in a Faraday Cage when not in use.

if present SSDs were made to serve as supersized RAM, would they be as durable as regular RAM?

There is a big difference. The SSDs can only be written to so many times. They reportedly hold the data quite well until that point. If you tried to use them as RAM, I would imagine that you would have to replace them quite often.

On the other hand, you could use regular RAM like SSDs, but it would be far more expensive and you would have to have a battery to maintain the data when the computer is turned off. Many people with plenty of RAM do allocate some as a small high-performance virtual disk but every time they start the computer, they have to reload that virtual disk.