Hybrid Storage Failed Once. Will It Fail Again?
StorageSwiss, Thursday, October 1st, 2026
Soaring flash prices revive hybrid storage, and George Crump says success depends on where tiering logic runs.
StorageSwiss analyst George Crump revisits hybrid storage, which lost out a decade ago when opaque array-controller caching algorithms sent busy volumes to slow disk.
Flash and memory prices rose 70-95% in the first half of 2026 as AI buildouts absorbed supply, and enterprise NVMe now costs about $706 per terabyte versus $56 for a 24TB hard drive, roughly 12-14 times more, reopening the hybrid question for refresh cycles.
Crump argues tiering inside the infrastructure software, with cache next to the VM and IT control over placement, can avoid the first generation's failures.