The past, present, and future of storage media

Cloud storage is the (distant) future

Cloud computing is trending throughout the technology industry, but the cloud storage aspect is a long way from being a viable alternative to local disk storage

Optical storage: here today, gone tomorrow

Technology becomes redundant and is either replaced or scrapped completely. We take a look at some technologies that won’t be here tomorrow

Hard drives are here to stay

SSDs are the buzzword in storage technology, but hard disk drives are here to stay

"ssd have their place in modern computing, and are likely the future of storage technology, though they won’t replace HDDs until they manage to achieve all the above and more"

I agree, they are not meant to be for storage and we all know that by now, but SSD is the biggest performance upgrade to your PC for far less than upgrading your CPU in terms of pure user experience.

Also, yes the hard drive prices are ridiculously low priced atm. I got more than I will ever need I hope, cos if I need something I will just download it again

SSDs are still too "new" to be considered properly worth it. I know they aren't meant to be storage drives, but to me having a small drive with a low(ish) lifespan as an OS drive that gets multiple rewrites ALL the time for one helluva price just doesn't make sense for a small bump up in loading time in booting your OS.

I feel the same about optical storage. Remember when you used to hold funeral services for DVD's when they burnt out way back when in 2001? The bloody price of them was just painful! Nowadays, that is the bluray disc. It is definitely the end of the disc as most people opt to buy low cost hard drives instead. The only thing DVDs are good for is burning stuff for buddies and giving it away. Oh and for technophobes only now catching up to last decades technology Once again, Sony has gone with a technology that may be doomed before it even hits mainstream. Sure sure, there is a market for it for full HD movies but I suspect as line speeds increase in SA and bandwidth prices get cheaper, alot of people will be accessing content online. Already we have seen DSTV launch that rental service for somewhat new(ish) movies, essentially killing off the video store.

Cloud storage does indeed have a very long way to go. I think a lot of people wouldn't want to go toward this type of technology due to all the cons outweighing the pros as listed in the article. Just imagine, your entire years work on the cloud just vanishing and what can you do about it? Also why the hell would anyone want to rent out storage space, spend money and time uploading and downloading from it (time being an annoying factor here) and possibly not being able to access it at all due to connectivity issues?

All in all, I don't see much change in the next 4 to 5 years at the very least, the technology still needs to improve vastly before it becomes a viable and cost effective solution.

I have an Ocz 2 120GB SSD as my primary drive and a 500GB Hybrid as a secondary drive. Trust me. This is not a small bump in performance improvement. It is massive!!! If you are not experiencing a major improvement in performance then you must have one of the lower specced ones. It its very important to take note of the read/write speeds.
Mine is rated at 280/220. The newer ones on the market are rated at 550 odd. That is more than twice what I have now. I can only imagine how much better it must be.

Don't just dismiss them. Try a decent one and see for yourself

They don't just affect boot time. Overall experience its greatly improved. I live at my notebook (software developer) and now that I have experienced a good SSD I could never go back to HDD.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

Mike Smit said:

I have an Ocz 2 120GB SSD as my primary drive and a 500GB Hybrid as a secondary drive. Trust me. This is not a small bump in performance improvement. It is massive!!! If you are not experiencing a major improvement in performance then you must have one of the lower specced ones. It its very important to take note of the read/write speeds.
Mine is rated at 280/220. The newer ones on the market are rated at 550 odd. That is more than twice what I have now. I can only imagine how much better it must be.

Don't just dismiss them. Try a decent one and see for yourself

They don't just affect boot time. Overall experience its greatly improved. I live at my notebook (software developer) and now that I have experienced a good SSD I could never go back to HDD.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

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I agree with you. I will not build/buy a new computer without a SSD.

Regarding optical storage: I stopped using CDs and DVDs. They are a short term storage solution and the size limitation does not make it useful for backup purposes. I am actually thinking about removing my laptops optical drive to make space to fit a SSD.

zamicro said:

I agree with you. I will not build/buy a new computer without a SSD.

Click to expand...

Same here and I'd follow the same path as Mike -> SSD as my primary drive (no "data" at all) with a hybrid HDD for my data.

Mike Smit said:

I have an Ocz 2 120GB SSD as my primary drive and a 500GB Hybrid as a secondary drive. Trust me. This is not a small bump in performance improvement. It is massive!!! If you are not experiencing a major improvement in performance then you must have one of the lower specced ones. It its very important to take note of the read/write speeds.
Mine is rated at 280/220. The newer ones on the market are rated at 550 odd. That is more than twice what I have now. I can only imagine how much better it must be.

Don't just dismiss them. Try a decent one and see for yourself

They don't just affect boot time. Overall experience its greatly improved. I live at my notebook (software developer) and now that I have experienced a good SSD I could never go back to HDD.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

I`ve noticed the brand of SSD also seems to have a huge impact, i believe the Ocz is indeed awesome, also didn`t realise the speeds have kept improving.

Ps. If I was you I`d keep a clone of my SSD on that 500GB, once you start hitting the SSD`s max read/writes and having it as a OS drive
is probably the fastest way to get there. Would love to know how long it practically takes to get to it though