Hard drives are heading the way of floppies, but when?

[RV_]

I'm seeing 500GB SSDs from the best makers now at around $100.00. I'm also reading about how fast the prices are dropping and the reliability going up. But this article is a great look at how and when.

 

Excerpt:

 

"Solid-state drives are making inroads as the default mass storage option in PCs. HP and Toshiba execs weigh in on when SSDs will finally overtake HDDs.

 

A decade ago, 3.5-inch floppy disk drives stopped appearing as standard features in personal computers. Now, with the rise of solid-state drives, disposable memory cards, cloud storage, and ubiquitous Wi-Fi, the concept of traditional hard disk drives as standard options will probably be the next to end.

 

There's no doubt that it will happen, according to officials at Hewlett-Packard, which had the second-highest worldwide PC market share in 2015, and Toshiba, which was the third-ranking hard disk manufacturer. The question is, when?

 

HP and Toshiba officials both said the timing depends on when the capacity-to-cost ratio of solid-state drives (SSDs), which are very fast, can ever match that of hard disks, which are slower because they have moving parts. When that happens, then hard disks will join floppy disks, cassettes, paper tape, and punched cards in the proverbial bit bucket.

 

HP's Mike Nash, vice president of the personal systems division, observed that niche products such as high-end gaming rigs, many corporate PCs, high-end laptops, and low-end laptops such as Chromebooks are already largely shipping with SSDs, not HDDs, as their standard configurations.

 

That's true across the industry, not just from the Palo Alto, Calif. computing and printing giant. Still the majority of 2015's industry-wide sales of 288.7 million units, 18.2% of which are HP models, are just ordinary computers. Ever-growing file sizes in applications, operating systems, and multimedia are pushing the capacity increases at price points that SSDs can't currently match, Nash said.

 

"Do I think that in N years everything will be SSD instead of rotating? The answer is ultimately yes, the question is when," Nash said. "It comes down to price versus function. We have a very diverse set of customers, and each type represents a different demand curve," he noted."

 

More on the crazy sized SSDs and the industry leaders view of how it will evolve is in the article here:

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/hard-drives-are-heading-the-way-of-floppies-but-when/?ftag=TRE684d531&bhid=19724681974700635514865380622813

 

 

[RV_]

You must have bought way after me. My first one had no hard drives and two 5.25" floppies a Commodore 64, then my first MSDOS IBM box had a humongous 5MB drive, might have been 10. My 1998 era laptop running Windows 98SE had a 1.1GB drive and that was large. The RAM upgrade cost $1500.00 and I don't remember if that was for a 512MB stick I believe.

[RV_]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xerE0pbJKQ

[Jim & Wilma]

Got you all beat. First computer was a Heathkit H11 built around a DEC LSI11 processor. Memory storage was punched paper tape. . . . where I learned all about hanging chad way before the 2000 election.

[Yarome]

Interesting thread. Brings back memories. I'm not even that old but my first computer used a standard single sided cassette tape and machine code. When 86-DOS came out that was just the 'bees-knees'! Only the "cool" nerds had 5 1/4" drives (probably their daddy's).

[Selah]

My first computer was a Timex-Sinclair. Used a TV for a monitor, ran Basic, and used a casette tape for storage. Next was a Leading Edge, maxed out to 640 K memory, two 5 1/4 floppies, and later a 30 meg RLL hard drive card. And it had a color monitor! Over locked the 8088 processor to 6 MHz.

What speed and want could you possibly do with 30 meg of storage. Paired that with a 1200 baud modem. Awsome!

[fortytwo]

1981 - Atari 800 with 48K memory (32k memory board - to save a slot for memory expansion - cost $100 extra). Separately purchased 128k 5 1/4 floppy cost $500. Followed by Corona "luggable - 38#" clone with 2 single side 5 1/4 floppys. Overclocked the 8088 to 8mhz! Bargain price of $2,000! Seems like every computer I ever lusted for cost $2,000.

[RV_]

My first storage was a clay tablet we wrote on when still moist and then fired. Occasionally they blew up just like today's.

 

Seriously interesting reading folks thanks.

[Yarome]

My first storage was a clay tablet we wrote on when still moist and then fired. Occasionally they blew up just like today's.

 

Even then it was the same upgrade "game"... finger to stick to bone to reed to copper stylus's. Nice to see how much we've evolved.

[RV_]

Naw I decided that since the price of bronze stylus tips was coming down I'd wait and then got one of them just as iron stylus' with 30,000 Strokes MTBF capacity started to come out. Then a few thousand years later I got a capacitive tip stylus, only to find I had to upgrade my tablet to one that used the lightning from the double slits in the wall.

[Yarome]

I had to upgrade my tablet to one that used the lightning from the double slits in the wall.

 

Ahhh.. a Tonatiuh.. We had an Amaterasu.

[RV_]

OMG!

[RV_]

Gods Mntom, Thus my jest back with OMG! Yarome is grasping at Ancient Aztec and Japanese godhead words. Just playing along, no meaning at all related other than ancient whatever.

[Alie&Jim's Carrilite]

First was a commodore-64, then a TRS-80 all in one machine... desktop portable! Then went to one of the first Macs... should have stayed in the Mac world but they were way too expensive.

[Mark and Dale Bruss]

IBM 1620, no disk, card in, card out, temporary storage on magnetic tape.

[Ray,IN]

The first computer I ran ( 1975) barely fit into the 20'X20' room, and used huge spools of tape. Input was with punch cards. (my brief stint as section NCOIC of the Army's computer on base) I don't remember anything else. Today your cell phone has multiple times more computing power than that monster.