Really cool article from foxnews.com discussing the new trend of PC’s offering slimmer to no hard drives.
It makes a few salient points about the fact that vendors are moving in that direction but I have aways felt that there will continue to be a need for disk storage.
I love the way it ended:
Windows 8 has no official launch date, though if Microsoft keeps to typical release schedules, it should debut sometime in late 2012. That slow progress is key, Rubin said, because the hard drive won’t be chucked in the bin overnight. “It can be effective for ‘lightweight’ data such as text and contacts — and an effective way to combat piracy via streaming movie services — but it is still financially challenging to move huge volumes of personal media such as photos and videos to cloud-based storage,” Rubin told FoxNews.com.
“Even handsets still ship with gigabytes of data, as wireless networks still lack the speed and prevalence to deliver everything we want everywhere we want it.” He’s right. It’ll take time to completely eliminate an industry that sells billions of units per year.
“I don’t see hard disks becoming irrelevant in the short-term future,” Rubin added. “Streaming still has its downsides — for one thing, it eats up battery life like crazy. And wireless carriers are trying to nudge people to data plans that put a cap on usage, which means you can’t keep humongous files in the cloud without keeping tabs on how much data you’ve downloaded.”
Yes, the cloud may be the future, but hard drives will still persist — they’re just too deeply ingrained in what we do, at least for the time being. And even if they are ultimately pulled from computers, hard disks could persist, just not in a format we’re used to. After all, even data and content online has to live somewhere, doesn’t it?
“All that data stored in the cloud isn’t on droplets of airborne water,” Rubin joked. “It’s stored on hard drives.”
Even though there is a move to cloud based storage, there will ALWAYS be people and organizations who want to store documents locally.
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Storing data locally is a no-brainer. The problem I have with Cloud based data (living outside the USA) are:
1. You always need to be connected to access your data
2. Your equivalent bandwidth needed to combat your local 100Mb/1Gb connection to your local server is insurmountable.
3. For mobile users: wireless carriers are charging a fortune for the data plan, so
  a. We need to constantly pay the Cloud hosting company to access my data
  b. We need to constantly pay the wireless carrier company to access my data
So in essence, you’re being screwed twice… thanks but no thanks
4. Try changing your Cloud provider (for whatever reason), and see how much fun it is to move terabytes over the cloud. Talking about vendor lock-in/marriage made in hell.
For personal stuff like pictures and some program settings to be stored in the cloud is not a biggy, but betting a fortune 1000 or better company on it?… Call me back in 2020, hopefully its better