Will Cloud Make The Hard Drive Obsolete? (game, 80gb, work)

[Pruzhany]

I actually think that hard drives are dying for the everyday consumer. I mean today you'll have SSDs in laptops... and soon it will be the norm in desktops

You do know that a Solid State Drive (SSD) is basically a Hard Drive without moving parts. So its still on-site storage. Its a natural progression from the days we used RAM as temporary storage to external thumb drives to now internal SSD's. The only way Cloud is going to work is if it syncs to it in the background without user having to click anything (similar to an mp3 device).

[EscapeCalifornia]

Hard drives will be around as long as they provide the cheapest and fastest way to store lots of data.

[Pruzhany]

Only a moron would put all of their personal data on a cloud out of their control. Would you put your tax documents on a cloud server?

Actually corporations having been doing it for years on virtual storage devices. In numerous large corporations with mid to high security situations use desktop computers to hold programs only and link to server storage to hold the data. And also have reduntant backups on top of this.

[southseeker]

Difference between a corp setup and a consumer setup is that they usually use dedicated servers, while the consumers got to rely on a third-party. I think long-term cloud computing won't work with consumers as long as ISPs continue to limit bandwidth use and only offer modest gains in speed increases for the consumer. Therefore, hard-drives and other disc media are here to stay imo.

[Pruzhany]

Hard drives will be around as long as they provide the cheapest and fastest way to store lots of data.

Actually they'll be around until the manfacturer sector decided not to make them anymore since SSD's have an extremely low manufacturing cost (to build, not its parts yet). If you don't believe it just look up the transition from music LP's to music CD's. The prices of the music CD's were nearly triple for awhile and settled at double (where they currently sit now). And its current cost to manufacture, including the CD, is now about 0.19 cents each.

[Pruzhany]

Difference between a corp setup and a consumer setup is that they usually use dedicated servers,

Well sort of. The servers are now in different countries/cities rather than be being in the same complex.

[thecoalman]

Originally Posted by EscapeCalifornia

Sure, when I have a 6GB/sec symmetric Internet connection (with no bandwidth cap) that reaches every corner of the globe with no chance of a provider suddenly deciding for whatever reason to delete or suspend my account (along with all my data) without recourse.

That should be easy order to fill. There is a lot of uses for the "cloud" but primary data storage isn't it.

[EscapeCalifornia]

Originally Posted by NeilVA

Actually they'll be around until the manfacturer sector decided not to make them anymore since SSD's have an extremely low manufacturing cost (to build, not its parts yet). If you don't believe it just look up the transition from music LP's to music CD's. The prices of the music CD's were nearly triple for awhile and settled at double (where they currently sit now). And its current cost to manufacture, including the CD, is now about 0.19 cents each.

I just don't see the $/GB of SSD's matching magnetic prices for a while. Its not like the hard drive makers are just going to roll over and watch their business die without a fight.

We're already at the point where the typical user can get by with just an SSD since they're not using much drive space anyway. They just need to be cheaper to really take market share. I see people all day long with 250GB hard drives and 40GB of stuff, including the OS and apps. But for storing serious amounts of data, hard drives will rule for a while still.

[Pruzhany]

Its not like the hard drive makers are just going to roll over and watch their business die without a fight.

Go to their websites. They all have SSD's listed as part of their lines.

I just don't see the $/GB of SSD's matching magnetic prices for a while.

If the market was as strong as pre-2009, it would have happened already. Just go back to the XP days where the HD's were less than 40G and how much we were paying for those. Give it 5 years.

[bs13690]

That won't happen for a long time. Too many people don't have access to good broadband for one thing.