Recently, there have been some examples of non-volatile memories actually making it commercially in the next couple of years. Then I read this article at the register, which points to this article by ExtremeTech(Ziff-Davis). Microsoft, the only company next to Apple that we can rely on for innovation these days, is asking hard drive vendors to add a tier to the storage with some flash memory. Why? Somebody over their is slowly getting it.
I wrote an article myself almost 5 years trying to make the case for this. My idea wasn’t new, the intent of the article was to push the idea back into the arena again. At the time, the economies of DRAM were at a good point, and it had applications in the server farms as well as low-power laptops.
According to the ExtremeTech article, Microsoft is asking for the vendors to add Flash to the drives. I think this is a mistake. The write speeds for flash are still slow, and you may hit the write-cycle-limit.
Anyways, all of this is two years away, and non-standard. I expect some other technologies to pop-up and perform the same role. Consumers will continue to get better and better technology.