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What will replace hard drives?

J

Jeriko

Senior member
I was just curious... What technologies are on the horizon that might offer a practical replacement for motorized hard drives? Surely we can't rely on this technology for another decade - and their performance has not kept pace with the other components of a system. Is there anything that will offer a speed similar to RAM, with no moving parts, and that is very inexpensive to produce in large capacity units?

-J
 
How about soft drives?

But seriously, HD's will be around at least for 10 more years. It's a little early to speculate, no?
 
I want to see something that has enough bandwidth and low-latency to act as RAM and a storage device, so basically you could have unlimited RAM and harddrive access would be extremely fast.

Of course this is awhile off, like 10-20 yrs, but its where i see storage eventually ending up.
 
When I first heard of CD-ROMs in '85, floppy drives were dominate over hard drives, which were only 10MB or 20MB in size at the time, verses 650MB for CD-ROMs. Later when I heard of DVDs which hold 4.7GB, hard drives were about 500MB at the time. Later I heard of SERS (Surface Enhanced Raman Scanning), which is supposed to store 65GB on CD sized media. Now I'm using an 80GB drive and there are 200+GB drives out there.

Who says hard drive (magnetic media) tech has not kept pace with other technologies? We now have FireWire, and are about to go to SATA, which is supposed to rival the fastest SCSI performance, eventually.

I predict you're going to be "stuck" with hard drives for the next 30 years, at least.
 
Unless a new transfer interface for hard drives is created that becomes wide-spread, I do not think they will be around for thirty years. Ten years is a much better guestimate. I don't know too much about the next wave of storage devices, so I won't comment.
 
i dont see hard drives ever reaching ram speeds...
by the time harddrives come even near the speeds of like pc133, ram speeds will be crazy high.
faster memory of all types is more expensive...therefore mass storage will be the cheapest of the storage devices.
same idea that ram will never reach cache speeds.
but i agree hard drives are lagging in todays hardware industry.
 
There is experimentation now with holographic storage devices, sort of an optical device with no spinning media. I don't know if the technology will be mainstream in the near future (10-20 years) I think HDD will be around for at least that long. RAM drives are available but are crazy-expensive. Who knows what the future of computing will be. It could be some sort of bio-electrochemical (akin to the human brain) for that matter.
 
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