And in the age of cheap removable memory, it's a shame there's no way to expand the unit's very limited storage capacity.

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Greater production efficiencies and higher production volumes led to lower cost, enabling some ability to lower prices but the ability of the industry to sustain unit growth as well as storage capacity growth to match the needs of content hungry users and protect itself from competing technologies is threatened by the relentless drop in HDD ASPs.

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The Japanese firm is pinning its hopes on the processing power and storage capacity of its new console, which will include a revolutionary processing unit based on the new Cell chip, developed with IBM and Toshiba.

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The performance gains that flash memory provide will cause solid growth in the enterprise storage market, Burke predicted that unit growth will be 42% from 2011 to 2012 with capacity growth of 90% but over the same time period enterprise HDDs will grow 25% in units and 83% in storage capacity.

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