The Extinction of Hard Drives
Electronics, Semiconductors May 22nd, 2008A discussion was going on this morning in the office about the future of hard drives as we know them going the way of the floppy drives. Think about it, ten years ago, we had 3.5 inch and maybe a 5¼ floppy drives. The computer I write on has a 3.5 floppy drive, but I would be hard pressed to find a floppy for it. What would replace the hard drive? The same thing that replaced the floppys: Flash drives (aka solid state drives).
It will take a few years for this to happen, though some laptops are offering solid state drives instead of the normal hard drives. The cost for large flash drives makes it too expensive for it to happen – but in the next few years, they will get bigger and cheaper.
As I think about all the things this would mean to computers (smaller, less power, longer battery life for laptops, faster retrieval, no moving parts), I wonder what the next few years will bring to the computer world.
Mark Viquesney
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:53 pm
mark, I agree wholeheartedly, but I think there are 3 factors signaling the death of mechanical hard drives. 1 - solid state drive as you’ve described, I’ve seen a terabyte ssd recently; 2 - the move to cloud computing, where all the data is in the cloud; and 3 - much farther in the future new forms of optical storage that are incredibly fast and have huge capacities.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
I didn’t even think about cloud computing, which you have written about in your blog. And optical storage… so, maybe ssds won’t be around as long as the mechanical hard drive…