Does the Consumer Hard Drive Have a Future?

I agree with this Murray's comment "I'm not entirely thrilled at the prospect of having to trust someone - anyone - I've never met with keeping my files backed up. That's my responsibility, and I want to be sure it gets done right and on time, and constantly sending stuff back and forth to the cloud simply doesn't give me the kind of guarantee that helps me sleep better at night." I have doubts on the security of the cloud so will not be backing up my personal info there anytime soon.

If you think hard drives have gotten expensive, just wait till your PC has no resident operating systems and ALL your data and operating systems are out of your control, somewhere in a cloud.

Bill has plans for your future that don't include your having control of much besides a keyboard and display.

Hang on.

I'm with you, AND your sarcasm at the thought. I'm a former sysadmin, on distributed systems, and I could manage in that environment very well. But I loathe the idea of going back to those days. Especially now, where it is not a requirement driven by the limits of available technology, but solely by one man's greed.

I don't begrudge Bill and company their money, but they seem insatiable. And I'm a free man, totally averse to EVER going back into slavery to their wallets.

. . . or control of your wallet either.

Won't happen.

Many of us work with sensitive or secret data that simply can not be exposed to external control or storage.

Additionally, it will be a long, long time before access to internet connections will be fast enough to supply the data rates required for OS processes.

The trend is to push family data offsite (i.e., cloud) and keep the OS in the machine on on solid state memory. We are starting to see, finally, machines that keep the OS in nonvolatile memory and turning off the machine simply suspends operation. Turning the machine back on resumes at the same place you left off. Eventually, this will become totally transparent to the user, like turning on a calculator. The speed should be nearly instantaneous.

Does the Consumer Hard Drive Have a Future?

Yes.

_{Next question?}

I dunno... seems like, currently, this would be an extravagance. (Not nearly as extravagant as party balloons, mind you.) But then maybe I've given too much credence to articles about helium shortage. A Popular Mechanics article covers the essence of the issue, but many links come up when searching "helium shortage."

Maybe it's not always wise to do something just because we can. Or maybe using helium in HD's would encourage more private enterprise in helium production. It is a finite resource that should be managed.

At my age, though, I find I don't get too excited about potential problems like this. It's the current and upcoming, younger generation that needs to pay attention to resource planning/mangement. I think I'll be long gone when/if many of our limited resources run dry. Still, it would be poor stewardship of our resources to not voice a concern at all.

Maybe not. If I consider a thumb drive not a hard disk then I could live with storing my data there, run all applications off a solid disk or in a cloud or whatever and these spinning noise mechanical drives will be the past.

But the thumb drive needs to be pretty damn big and have a live expectation beyond what it is now.

Question is is there a 1 TB thumb drive available nowadays?

Micron makes a .5Tb and a 1Tb thumb drive chip. Microns sells the .5 but their parent company sells the 1Tb. I will go to Linux before using a cloud OS.

No chance of me putting my Intellectual property or all my legal files in the cloud.

Neither am I. The thumb drive is where you store it. Cloud is just the processing unit. But you are right, who tells us what is left in the cloud once processed there.