We declared 2008 the year of Solid State Storage, but what about your standard, run-of-the-mill hard drives? What’s going to happen in that part of the industry? In one word: nothing. That’s right, the ever-depressing industry is going to relax with normal hard drives and focus their entire attention on SSD units. It makes sense, but the price point on SSDs is not going to be low enough for mainstream adoption, at least not this year. For those of us who are going to stick with platter-based drives, we would still like to see some innovation take place. No such luck, said the companies we talked to at CES 2008.

The most you will see are higher capacity single drives and lower prices. Impressive, we know!

That’s not to say a storage company won’t surprise its competitors with marginal improvements here and there, but we wouldn’t expect disrupting technologies to emerge in 2008, other than SSD, that is. Oh, and for those of you who might be interested, the R&D process has been shortened from a couple of years to about a 6-month cycle. Not that it’s going to help any.

[Gundeep Hora]

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