Disk Drives

As I used to work in the disk drive industry (Conner Peripherals - bought over by Seagate), I like to follow news about developments in the disk drive industry.

Today, I came across a very amusing YouTube video featuring disk drives:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3plw-oye90

The disk drives in the video are supposedly from Maxtor. Now you know why Maxtor lost money and was finally sold to Seagate too

However, the disk drive industry is facing a threat form flash-memory based drives (solid state drives). Today, I read a news item about Samsung releasing a 256GB solid state flash memory drive:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9952007-7.html

With such high capacity flash-based drives becoming main stream, I think it is a matter of time before flash-memory drives completely displaces disk drives in consumer appliances. Perhaps in 2 or 3 years, the only disk drives in the market will be the very high capacity ones - 1 terabyte and larger - used mainly for backup storage or in servers. The majority of consumers will probably be using only solid-state drives in their laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, game consoles etc.