Nickname: Jeff

Review: US100 can only buy 1GB SD 2 years ago but now can buy 2 4GB SD. However, the capacity of hard drives doubles every 2 years (2000 -- 2006). At this trend, flash would eat up more market of hard drive in 6 years.

Date reviewed: Mar 16, 2007 10:53 AM

Nickname: Aidan

Review: I already have a solid state hard drive in my Powerbook G4. Ever since I read Samsung's announcement that they were going to start making them, I've wanted one, and after months of waiting for Samsung to ship them, I gave up and ordered (from ebay sellers) an 8GB CF card and an adaptor. I've since seen 16GB flash drives available on Ebay, and it's only a matter of time before they'll have 32GB ones, at which point I'll upgrade. I like not having to take a power supply or second battery with me, but that's not why I bought it. The reason is sound: hard drives are noisy, flash memory is silent. As for the limited number of erase cycles, that did concern me enough to email the manufacturer to check their product was internally robust enough, and it is. Besides, flash is failsafe - even if you can't write to it, you can still read it. Conventional hard drives fail to danger - once they stop working you lose all your data.

Date reviewed: Sep 25, 2006 2:37 PM

Nickname: new seagate fan

Review: I purchased a new WD4000KS recently from WD, only to have it fail within a month, losing nearly a month's worth of data. I will never, ever buy a WD product again. From what I can tell, many other people have had the same failures. If I were you I'd consider shorting the stock.

Date reviewed: Aug 24, 2006 5:58 PM

Nickname: frankg

Review: I disagree with Watkin's assertion of a 3 to 1 ratio favoring hard drives over flash. I think the availability of relatively cheap thumb drives with highly dense storage capacity could be very disruptive. I have a home desktop, a personal notebook, a work desktop, a work notebook, several PCs I alternate between in the lab at work, as well as computers I use in the computer lab at school. A continual annoyance is not having the correct data or program where it is needed. I can imagine a world where PCs become dumb kiosks with no permanent storage simply a USB or firewire port where users can dock their system. If the kiosk is x86 and the BIOS can boot from the thumb drive, the user is ready to go. So instead of lugging your labtop through security just keep your system on the thumb-drive in your pocket. Imagine home much cheaper it would be to maintain storage-less computers, no viruses, no worries. So maybe those other guys should consider selling their hard drive units.

Date reviewed: Aug 17, 2006 4:00 AM

Nickname: Farmer Pete

Review: Seagate has already made hard drives that are drop tollerent. They can make a 12 GB 1-inch drive (Compact Flash microdrive) that can sense when it starts dropping and will move the read heads off the platters to protect it from damage. I believe they can take up to a 3 meter drop just fine. Having said that, the one thing no one has mentioned as of yet is speed. Hard drives are limited to the speed the platters can turn. Standard desktop drives are 7200rpm. Laptop drives run 4200, 5400, or 7200. The problem is, the fast the drive, the more power and heat it generates. As for desktop systems, 99% of them are 7200rpm, with a few 10k drives, and 15k speeds are limited to the fastest server drives. A true solid state drive could reach speeds that would make hard drives look like floppy disks.

Date reviewed: Aug 15, 2006 4:25 PM

Nickname: 2disbetter

Review: I think he is spot-on with his 250 gb notebook standard 3 years down the line. The Internet is great, but no one will rely on the Internet as a means of data retrieval. People want videos, pictures and music on their notebooks. Those things take space. Being portable means you might not always have the means or equipment to recieve an Internet connection, thus storing it "locally" is and will be the ideal fix. I think Nano drives are great, but honestly believe they will never catch up to traditional HDD, and all. Power was understated though. Power consumption is a big concern to a lot of people-- especially in the handtop, and PDA categories. Less power consumed by a disk drive means longer battery life. Still, these are relatively smaller areas than what storage is traditionally used for.

Date reviewed: Aug 15, 2006 1:22 PM

Nickname: Scooter

Review: HDD will continue growing due to HD video, digital music and other digitization. Enterprise level and retail should expand greatly. Think terabyte arrays for home theatre and digital backup. Google's Web storage will need serious HDD space. However, we will all lap up cheap flash memory when it comes for portable applications - gaming, phones, cameras, laptops. Bring it on!

Date reviewed: Aug 15, 2006 5:42 AM

Nickname: Jack

Review: I believe many people are overlooking the potential impact the next operating system will have on hard drive/storage needs. We already know its going to take more RAM. It only stands to reason the new architecture will encourage much larger programs and probably file sizes as well. Now throw in 8 megapixel digital cameras, home videos and time shifting of recorded programs--it becomes obvious we are at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to future storage needs. No doubt flash memory will continue to get better. It may even become the storage vehicle of choice at some point in the future. But one only has to look at the CD, which led to the DVD to see how far platter storage has come. That leads me to believe the HD industry still has legs that will more then likely carry it at least another five years!

Date reviewed: Aug 15, 2006 3:29 AM

Nickname: Moose

Review: Flash has a finite number of erase-rewrite cycles that make it incompatible for systems that frequently write and update data to media.

Date reviewed: Aug 14, 2006 11:00 PM

Nickname: Maybe

Review: I like Mr. Watkin's honesty. How about WD's ability to make huge profits in the low end area while Seagate is suffering due to many factors. Seagate's business is structured on areal density growth and will likely suffer if there is a slow down. However, WD's business is structured on maximizing efficiencies both in supply chain, design and component leveraging and amzing factory yields. So the question comes back. Is Seagate prepared to compete in the word of encroaching flash and slower area density growths?

Date reviewed: Aug 14, 2006 7:39 PM