In his IT Week column last week, my esteemed colleague Alistair Dabbs had a bit of fun at Apple’s expense over rumours it may be developing a laptop with Flash storage in place of a hard disk. He expressed the opinion that this is a waste of time and money, and cited similar products from the past that were commercial failures.

While I have the greatest respect for Alistair, I feel I must disagree with him on this subject. Flash memory is a much more mature technology than in the distant days of the Psion MC 400 mobile computer, and it possesses a number of important advantages over traditional hard drives that I believe will lead to it replacing them within the next few years.

First, a Flash drive consumes much less power than a spinning hard disk, which is a key consideration in a battery-powered device such as a laptop. Secondly, the absence of moving parts makes a Flash drive much more robust, which is also important in portable equipment. Flash also has higher read speeds than magnetic media.

Of course, there are also some disadvantages. Flash storage costs more per megabyte of capacity than hard disks, but the cost has been falling rapidly as manufacturers manage to squeeze ever greater storage cell densities onto the chips that make up Flash devices.

Flash memory also has a shorter lifetime because each memory location can only be written a limited number of times. But this is partly addressed by filing systems that distribute writes around the Flash array to even out the wear.

There is also the issue of market acceptance. Past computers such as Psion’s MC 400 used proprietary solid-state disk modules that did not work with other computers. Today, USB Flash drives are ubiquitous. Users have also grown comfortable with using the technology: Flash drives have replaced the floppy disk as the preferred personal storage medium.

Flash vendor Sandisk recently launched a Flash disk module that provides 32GB of storage for $350 (£180) and is a drop-in replacement for a standard 2.5in laptop hard drive. This may be less capacity than many current hard drives, but it is certainly enough to run Windows and almost any application you can think of.

I am certain that Flash or some other solid-state storage technology will be used more frequently in portable equipment such as laptops. I will even go as far as to say that I expect it to replace hard disks entirely in laptops; the only question is when. I would give it five years, at the most.