As you may have noticed from reading what I said instead of kneejerkin’ around (I just wanted to use that phrase), I’m not personally commenting on the future of HDD, I’m talking about the future of data storage, and this I see as the movement of the storage system, whatever they are, to other places accessed over the internet or some such method.
Honestly, cloud data storage isn’t going to happen for a while. Before it really becomes feasible as a reliable data storage method, very-high-speed Internet will have to get MUCH more widely available, actually more like ubiquitous, reliable, and cheap, which is still a ways off. Even things like FIOS are pretty slow when compared to current hard drive transfer rates.
Besides, I’m sure a lot of people would just rather keep their porn stash hidden on a single hard drive in their bedroom, rather than a hundred hard drives spread around the country.
Now there’s a thought… communal porn collection. I mean, why waste all that cloud storage storing the same thing with different names.
Isn’t that what the 4Chan archive is for?
Yea, but then you lose your porn, or at least access to it OR your computer if either YOUR computer breaks, your modem breaks, or your local ISP has an issue. You still gotta have in-computer storage, it’s just not going to go out of style.
Removable media is the best .
Small spheres made of an element that hasn’t been discovered yet. It floats above the machine using it. I seriously had a dream about that once. It was the only media I could find Silent Hill on. What?
Yeah, besides the fact that storage you install in your computer is cheap and fast, people just enjoy owning something that they are entirely responsible for and have freedom to do whatever they want with. It’s why DRM is so unpopular, because most forms of it make you feel like you’re not in control of what you paid for.
Anyways, CDs will soon be completely replaced by flash memory, and hard drives may soon be too, if they can perfect the SSD technology and make it cheaper. High-density holographic disks may also see some usage, but if we can perfect carbon nanotube based storage, then most everything else would become obsolete. Once we get to quantum computing, who knows what we might use.
has anyone said cloud servers yet? i mean technically its still hard drives, but the idea of a limited, individually operated hard drive is going the way of the dinosaur in favor of a limitless decentralized storage system.
Space Meat. The future of data is in Space Meat.
It all started in 1962. Utilizing advances in modern food synthesis, scientists at NASA began working on a germ hostile Space Meat. To be used during long expeditions into deep space. Only recently has their hard work paid off, as even more advances in the field of space meat have been made and applied to what is now called “Operation Meat”.
The Hard Drive is definitely being replaced by the Solid State Drive. Clear advantages: no mechanics thus faster and more reliable. Probably consumes less power too, but very expensive now, will be worth it later.
The CD/DVD/BluRay stuff will probably be replaced by something “solid state” as well, as laptops are getting so thin that a compact disk reader just ads unnecessary bulk. They’re very slow and unreliable. I imagine that disposable Flash Memories are not really going to be worth it any time soon, unless they invent some new cheap way to do it.
So I think that soon everyone will get used to having a small USB drive with them all the time, as it is almost the case today, and if you want to give some huge files (lets say 4GB of photos after a photo shoot) to someone, you will just ask them to give you their USB Pen drive so you can copy them onto it. It’s much faster and you don’t end up with a disc laying around after you’ve copied them onto your computer.
Maybe mobile phones could have a Bluetooth capability that allows easy transfer of files onto their storage which now can be pretty large. Everyone has a mobile phone, so everyone would eventually have storage with them. However, today, this only works on a few phones and it’s complicated to set up, and very very slow.
I also imagine that transferring a few GB of data over the net is no longer a big problem, and you have file hosting sites such as Google Docs, and Cloud Computing is becoming a popular term, so maybe the solution will be on the internet.
As for music and movies: people download that kind of stuff anyway. There’s legal ways to do it too, iTunes, etc…
Not using mechanical parts does not necessarily make it faster. Last I checked, hard disk drives still beat solid state by a factor of 10 in straight read/write speed. SSD does however have an advantage if your data is really fragmented.
There is another advantage of solid-state versus “mobile” state:
Shock-resistance.
I can take my solid-state MP3 player and put it through the equivalent of a 9.9 earthquake and it wouldn’t skip a beat. You can’t do that with a device where the data is on a spinning disc.
I believe my hard disk drive warranty only covers it to 300G shock…
the cd wil probably be overtaken by personal flash devices. In truth, audio CDs aren’t used terribly often; mp3 players used much more often.
but if you’re talking about what supersedes the digital disc… like blu-ray, dvd, etc…
i’d have to say that streaming would come next. It will begin replacing video i believe.
hard drives… I believe the next step is holo discs. Those are capable of holding much data, so i think that will be the next turn, since current NTFS seems to be capped at 2TB per volume (even tho the theoretical max is way more… i dun get it)
What makes you so sure it will be holographic??? :meh:
I think the idea of gaming as of service to be completely idiotic.
Today, your kid can goto the store and buy a game. What in the f*** are they thinking, a 10 year old or younger isn’t going to pay monthly to game through an AMD super computer, get real MOFO.
Cd’s and hard drives are not going anywhere. Laser encoded/readable disks like Cds/dvdsblu-ray and platter type hard drives will only get denser over time. and they are way ahead of the of the curve (30 plus years) for ssd and solid state memory runs into voltage problems at high densities. Cloud storage is cool until there is a system wide problem that denies access to you.
Long live rotating machinery!!!
Not having access to this technology, most companies make theirs out of napkins.
Also, cloud storage isn’t a good choice for anything large (low speed of internet connections), anything personal (people freak out when their ISPs store search data, they’re not going to be okay with a company handling all their files), anything sensitive (exactly how secure is a file you transmit over the Internet?), or anything critical to have at a moment’s notice (you can’t trust your ISP to never go down), which makes it…mostly useless. There may be a future for cloud computing, but for cloud storage, almost certainly not.
Alot of companies are implementing full digitalisation, such as itunes for music, steam for games, alas not all games are supported with steam so it can be problematic in that scenario, besides, i like to have a HARD COPY of what i have, such as my music cd instead of internet/mp3/amazon/itunes, ya feel me?
i kind of like owning less stuff tbh. except books they dont count for some reason.