If you know anything about your computer you're familiar with the fact that the design of hard disk drives are the true dinasours of personal computer systems. Oh sure there has been some evolution of the hard drive over the years, but nothing really significant. Even the Western Digital 10,000 RPM wonder, appropriately named the Raptor, and currently the top dinasour, can create a significant bottle-neck when it comes to your computers' ability to process data. After all, your CPU,GPU and RAM, no matter how fast they are, can only process the data that is feed to them as quickly as it's feed to them. The hard drive, simply due to it's design, is limited to how much data it can cough up. However data storage as we now know it is about to become extinct!

One of the products of this evolution is hybrid magnetic drives. These drive use solid-state flash memory for faster speeds. Two of the key advantages of this type of drive is the magnetic drives do not spin as often and the flash memory data is moved even faster then the magnetic platters alone. Samsung has already released the MH80 series and Segate and Hitachi plan to release there own versions of the hybrid magnetci drive later on this year.

Two other exciting evolutions, but not quite ready for prime time, are probe memory  and phase-change memory.  Probe memory uses micor-electro probe tips in an array that can read and write data at the same time for faster speeds. This form factor can currently match speeds of current drives and promises to exceed those speeds as developments continue. Even more exciting is the technology called "phase-change" memory. IBM's labs, built and demonstrated a prototype phase-change memory device that switched more than 500 times faster than flash while using less than one-half the power to write data. "...phase-change memory has a very bright future. Many expect flash memory to encounter significant scaling limitations in the near future. Today we unveil a new phase-change memory material that has high performance even in an extremely small volume. This should ultimately lead to phase-change memories that will be very attractive for many applications," said Dr. T. C. Chen, Vice President, Science & Technology, IBM Research.

With all of the progress now taking place with consumer computerized products, it's about time our storage and delivery of data catches up. As usual, things depend on volume manufacturing and the ability to bring prices down, and as usual (i.e. CDs, DVDs, Blue-Ray, etc.) consumer demands will bring about this much over due evolution.

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