Hard Drives: An Endangered Species?

Nobody really loves a hard disk drive. They whir, they click, sometimes they seem to have such a hard time pushing out data, you picture them making that expression your dog makes when she goes potty. Well, or maybe that's just me.

Oh, and they crash, which often leads to the hard drive owner's consumption of hard liquor.

But here's the good news: eventually, hard drives will be eradicated, like vacuum tubes in computers, or smallpox. And they will be replaced by solid state flash drives, like the one in your iPod Nano or your little USB drive. They will have no moving parts. They will not make a sound. They will pour forth data like Niagara Falls. They will almost never crash.

The barrier has been capacity and cost. Hard drives can hold hundreds of gigabytes for a couple hundred dollars. Flash drives have been slowly climbing that ladder, and now cost around $20 a gigabyte. But last year, Samsung released a prototype 32 gigabyte drive, and this month Sony put out a limited edition laptop with a 32 gig flash drive. Intel's $300 ClassMate computer for developing countries has no hard drive, but instead has a 1 gig or 2 gig flash drive.

I put the question of whether hard drives are doomed to IBM's Jai Menon, VP of software and storage. His reply (with a caveat that "soon" is in the eye of the beholder):

In my view, they will not disappear any time soon.