Storage is leaping forward as fast as any segment of the technology market right now. Three news stories during the past week punctuate the rapid changes that are happening in storage:
- Toshiba announces 16 GB and 32 GB flash drives (News.com)
- Samsung Launches Tiny 160GB Hard Drive (PC World)
- Seagate to make flash-based hard drives (News.com)
The story about the 32 GB flash drives — which will be available in January — made me think of the little video camera we have at TechRepublic for shooting video clips. It has a built-in 30 GB hard drive, and we also have a 4 GB flash card that we use for taking short clips that can easily be downloaded to virtually any system. In January, we could get a flash card that is actually bigger than the camera’s built-in hard drive. Of course, the Samsung announcement portends that cameras, MP3 players, and other devices will soon be sporting much larger hard disk drives.
The news that Seagate is working on a new generation of hard drives that are actually based on flash storage rather than the traditional platters makes me think of the Palm Foleo, which is due to be released next month. I saw a demo of it at LinuxWorld in early August, and one of the things I was most impressed with was that it starts up immediately when you push the power button. This is a feature of flash-based storage as opposed to traditional hard drives.
