Back in May of this year, I wrote about the future of the spinning hard drive.
Expect all new PCs to be solid state within 5 years; no more moving parts
Boy was I wrong!
It looks like hard disks will lose their spin a whole heck of a lot earlier than I predicted. Starting next year, disk drive giant Seagate will be making the switch to solid state drives (SSD). Slowly.
I don’t even think it will take 5 years to make the full transition. I can see the future timeline looking like this:
2009 – SSDs become an option for a select group of PCs.
2010 – SSDs and traditional hard drives are available as options on all PCs / Apple goes all SSD
2011 – Only low-end PCs offer spinning hard drives
By 2012 I see spinning hard drives available pretty much like floppy disks are available today. They’re optional add-ons that a few people might have, but mostly the SSD will become the computer’s primary storage device. So the transition will be more like 3 years, not 5.
On my original post in May, reader ‘sriksrid’ commented that optical drives also need to go. I agree, but believe that the transition will be slower. There needs to be some form of electronic media to take over the role of music/video storage. Perhaps some new form of credit-card sized media card. (Today’s media cards are too tiny, being designed primarily for portable gizmos like cameras and cell phones.)
I’ll ponder the future, non-spinning replacement for the CD/DVD in a future blog post.
This move to solid state media has been coming. That’s why starting this year I’ve no longer been writing in my books about the computer’s “disk drive system.” Instead, I write “storage system” or “storage media.” That’s actually a better phrase anyway, seeing how 20 years ago hard drives were rare and floppy drives were the rage. But 20 years from now, spinning disks will be as antique as gas-powered automobiles.
Of course, owners of machines with BIOS that simply baulks at any 2 and a half inch drive bigger than 60GB are not going to be happy when they try to replace the hard disk with a 120GB or larger sized one. I wish companies still made them this size or less.
I recall your comment about the NEC Ultralite in your first book on laptop computing which I acquired some years ago, in that you could change the program by plugging in a rom disk. I see it got a mention in the first edition of Laptops for Dummies. I see something similar in the form of U3 — maybe that might be a good discussion point for the future.
Comment by richie — October 26, 2008 @ 7:14 pm
My impression is that if you use a larger capacity disk on a machine with an older BIOS that it simply recognizes the disk the capacity it knows. E.g., plug a 160GB drive into an old PC and it sees it as only a 60GB drive — unless you partition the thing. I might be wrong, but back in the early days, the PC/XT was limited to a 10MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive capacity. I had to partition my first hard drive, which was 20MB, into a C and D drive to use it under DOS 3.
Oh, the bad old days….
Comment by admin — October 26, 2008 @ 7:25 pm