Hard Drives to Possibly Become Extinct

By Ryan Krause –

What’s going to happen to the hard drives when the internet becomes a replacement?

In Maximum PC magazine, it was reported that the hard drive is one of the twelve pieces of technology that will disappear. The hard drive was ranked #4 to fade away soon in their magazine.

Gord Goble of Maximum PC wrote, “Today, hard drives are crazy cheap. So too were floppy drives and HD DVDs as their expiration date neared.”

It’s kind of like HD DVDs: they got really cheap then just fell off the face of the earth.

A regular computer hard drive. Photo owned by Maximumpc.com.

The internet is not the only thing taking out the hard drive.

There is a recently new type of drive called a SSD, or a Solid State Drive.

These drives operate on flash memory, although extremely expensive, these drives perform exuberantly faster than a regular hard drive.

They are also much more reliable and can take a beating compared to their more fragile counterparts.

Online websites such as Google Docs are also taking over for saving files.

“I find Google Docs to be quite convenient,” said senior Jerome Lynch.

Even news are more popularly online rather than on paper now.

Just like Penn Points.

The popular program, Steam, showcases their “Steam Cloud” function which allows gamers to save their save games on the Steam network.

This provides them with the ability to access their saves from multiple computers that have an internet connection.

The term for saving files online is generally referred to as the “cloud.”

It all comes down to whether or not the standard hard drive will be replaced by Solid State Disks and/or the “cloud.”

All that is certain is the hard drive is destined for the grave very shortly.

6 thoughts on “Hard Drives to Possibly Become Extinct”

  1. You cannot power on a computer without some sort of drive in the machine, so the only thing as of now that will replace the hard drive is SSD. SSD is extremely expensive and comes in small quantities, for example 64gb of SSD would be over $100. The internal and external will be around for a long time, they will just find improvements to enhance them. (higher writing speeds, less power consumptions, higher amounts of space ect.)

  2. As a response to Mr. Gates, what you said isn’t entirely accurate. Computers actually boot up using the BIOS chip when it receives power from the power supply. The BIOS chip handles the booting and then prods the boot device ( in most cases the hard drive) to get the operating system going. It’s entirely possible that, as we make advances in internet technology, we could see hardware on the motherboard that communicates with the internet when prompted by the BIOS and boots your OS from a cloud. That’s sure to be a long way away, but it has the potential to replace drives completely. We’ll be sure to see the rise of the SSD soon enough, but hard drives aren’t likely to die out until SSDs are much more affordable to produce with the same kind of data storage capacity as a standard hard drive.

  3. Firstly solid state drives are hard drives using a different method of storage. Until solid state can actually compete in terms of capacity and durability (not physical abuse I’m talking constant read/write data retention) you’ll find this opinion branded as informational false.

    As for Cloud storage is simply a hard drive in a different building. Most people I know won’t be jumping at the opportunity to store their stuff in a way that they themselves can’t physically oversee at any given moment. With the lack of data retention due to constant read/writes you will not find any SSD drives acting as cloud storage. You may find them holding the OS to increase boot times in a feeble attempt to speed up a server startup.

    Next time you want to write something up spend more than 15 minutes trying to find stuff that backs your opinion. We’ve moved into the ‘petabyte age’ now so storage density is a premium. Take a look at the advancement into platter density or the research being put into optical storage drives that actually use the entire physical volume of the platter as storage. There is your future.

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