Sherman Black, a senior vice president at Seagate Technology, the leader in hard disk drives, lies awake at night worrying that his teenagers are part of a new generation of computer users who don’t care if their data is stored locally or on the Web.
It matters to Black’s industry because a growing number of consumers are eagerly eyeing a new wave of solid-state disk drives. Made from arrays of flash memory chips, these new drives are smaller and many times faster than the traditional hard disk disks that read and write magnetic ones and zeroes on a rotating platter.
They are also, of course, more expensive. Small solid-state drives, with capacities of 2, 4 or 16 gigabytes, are already standard components of the “netbook” laptops being sold by Dell and Hewlett-Packard, and a 128-gigabyte drive now sells as a $500 upgrade to the MacBook Air from Apple.
This shift in storage technology is now possible because of the growth in flash chips. They are now ubiquitous in handheld devices like digital cameras and MP3 players. The other reason the shift is happening now is that these solid-state drives (so called because, unlike magnetic disk drives, they have no moving parts) are being designed to fit in the same space in laptops currently used by industry-standard 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch hard disks.
There are many benefits to this newer technology. Like hard disks, information can be stored permanently in flash chips even when power is turned off, and the chips can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. They make no noise, give off little heat and consume far less power, while transferring data on average many times faster than hard disks.
Of course, there are caveats. While solid-state drives can read information more quickly than hard disks, some models write information more slowly. That means that,…