Alright, I’m the first to admit the title is exaggerating, the disk drive still has a long life- but the replacement is here.
In an ironic coincidence on the very day Mike Parekh and Will Price are celebrating the disk drive’s 50th birthday (the first IBM unit weighed over 1 tons and held 5MB), CNet reports Samsung’s launch of its diskless portables.
There are absolutely no moving parts in these beauties. “Samsung claims the new model can boot up 25 to 50 per cent faster than conventional laptops as it has a read speed of 53MB per second and a write speed of 28MB per second.”
Faster, but smaller, the current flash storage size is 32G – perfectly enough for an Office 2.0 workhorse. Just like the computer commenters to my “Safer Office” post dreamed of.
Using web-based applications like the Zoho Suite, Flickr, Zooomr, why would I need more storage?
Of course for the foreseeable future we still need larger and larger disks – but let the guys at Omnidrive, box.net, Mozy..etc deal with them. After all, there are people holding up the “Cloud” 
Update (9/25): Check out Engadget on the Samsung Q1-SSD
Tags: Storage, Hard+disk, harddisk, SSD, flash+memory, diskless, Samsung, Office+2.0, WebOffice, Zoho, Zoho+Suite, Flickr, Zooomr, Omnidrive, box.net, Mozy
It’s faster, smaller, more reliable. But the most important thing to me: it eats up less batteries.
So with the same set of cells, I can shift the power around. Instead of using batteries to rotate plates I’ll use them for RF transmitters. Bluetooth, WiFi, EVDO, WiMax, Edge, etc.
Instead of having a bigger local hard disk, I’ll have always on access to the biggest disk out there: the Web.
To me, trading moving parts for RFs, local storage for infinite storage is the way of the future.
There’s a link on my blog to a detailed performance test of the Samsung SSD disk if you’re interested. I write about uninstalling everything from my desktop and have all data online and only use online webapplications. So 32 GB is more than enough for my uninstalled PC. At http://www.myuninstalledlife.com