The wicked old witch of technology is about to cast her final spell on the personal computer. The victim? That spinning hard drive in your PC’s bosom. Expect all new PCs to be solid state within 5 years; no more moving parts. Samsung is leading the way.
The 250GB Samsung Flash SSD (solid state drive), was announced May 26. It has the speed and reliability to make it competitive with the current, rotating hard disk technology. No word on a price yet, but you can read the boring details here.
SSDs are nothing new. The Mac Airbook comes with an SSD as an option. The price on that 64GB hard drive is something like $1,300. Yikes! But it uses less power and, I suppose, gives you bragging rights at Starbucks. Of course, prices do come down.
I’ve long predicted that hard drives would soon be a thing of the past. The spinning media is such a 1960s technology, but it’s been tough getting reliable and fast solid state drives to replace hard drives. The advances in flash memory technology have been great over the years, giving us digital media cards. The upcoming high-capacity flash SSD drives are the next, great evolutionary step.
So the floppy drive is gone, replaced by a host of digital media cards. (Indeed, the floppy drive in most of today’s PCs is replaced by that 19-in-one media card reader thing. It would be cool if they’d settle on just one type of digital media, but don’t hold your breath for that.) The hard drive will soon go. That leaves the optical disc format as the last one on its way out. Any predictions?
I’d say another 3-5 years tops for optical discs… Remember the old 5.25 disks? Those were around for quite a long time, the 3.5 weren’t there for as long (atleast I never used them as much – a short period between 5.25s and CDs)… DVDs will be on their way out soon, I guess.
Frankly, I hope a time will come when people will decide that owning their own hardware is just a waste of resources – I replace my laptop once every 3 years. There are lots of people on this planet who might be able to use my hardware, but it isn’t easy to get it to them. What I’d like to see is something similar to internet service providers – except you pay for the hardware/processing power you want to emulate (kind of like a central server system, except that instead of a terminal, you have a wireless hookup and a easy-to-carry touchscreen or something like that). Though, I guess that is years away (if ever), and I’ll be lugging my hardware around for a long time to come.
Comment by sriksrid — May 28, 2008 @ 3:10 pm
Interesting notion. I believe that’s part of the push behind the UMPC.
Comment by admin — May 28, 2008 @ 4:28 pm
Dan- check out the Asus EEE
Comment by Brad — May 28, 2008 @ 8:19 pm
Exactly!
Comment by admin — May 28, 2008 @ 9:42 pm