Perhaps, in the near future, having a traditional mechanical hard drive will be an indication that you are an ‘old timer’. What might compete with and replace the hard drives are the solid state flash drives. Samsung, for one, touts the flash drives as faster, more efficient, more durable and quieter than the hard drives that are used now. As Larry Magid noted in his review:

“…One of the advantages of solid state storage became evident as soon as I turned on the machine. It booted Windows much faster than a machine with a hard drive. Because memory has no moving parts, there’s no need to wait for a drive to spin up and for a mechanical read/write head to reach the right place on the disk.

The machine I tested was also faster in starting and quitting applications, loading data files and even shutting down, again because reading and writing from memory is faster than accessing a mechanical drive.”

link: Look, Ma - No Hard Drive!

At present, the cost of the solid state flash drives are high, compared to the traditional hard drives. However, it wasn’t too long ago that hard drives that were over eighty gigabytes seemed too costly. The prices have dropped dramatically. Perhaps the solid state flash drive will follow the same marketing and pricing trajectory… but at a much faster rate. And that’s because you want one.

Catherine Forsythe

[tags]solid state flash drives, hard drives, samsung, speed, efficiency, costs, larry magid[/tags]