RAM is fast and expensive, and goes bye-bye when you turn off the power. Hard drives are slow, fragile and suck power, but cheap and keep their data for a loooong time. Never the twain shall meet? The difference is beginning to break down, and we’ll all be happier for it. Large .5TB (500GB) drives are still standard 3.5″ drives. But 2.5″ notebook disks are gaining in capacity – now 160GB, which should satisfy most folks for a while. But the lines between hard drive and solid state storage are blurring:
- Flash memory is being integrated into hard drives to improve battery life and performance.
- Gigabyte has created an inexpensive card that uses RAM as a hard drive, and backs it up with a (not powerful enough) 16 hour battery.
- Seagate is cranking up the capacity of their 1″ drives – now at 8GB.
Long term, we’ll have a memory technology that is fast enough to serve as RAM yet cheap enough to come in huge capacities. This will make the distinction between RAM and disk irrelevent, and will lead to interesting new operating system designs that should be much simpler. In the shorter term, my prediction foolish hope is that laptop manufacturers will integrate 8GB of flash memory directly onto the motherboard, to use as a boot drive. Large media can still be stored on a traditional hard drive, but for the most part, the laptop should be able to run with no moving parts at all, which will decrease size and power consumption significantly. Put that in your Thinkpad X41 tablet!