Engadget had an article on Fujitsu’s commitment to solid-state hard drives, or “SSDs” that made me think of something that occurred to me recently about my predictions for the future. Specifically, about four years ago I remember sitting in my living room, bullshitting with my old college roommate, and saying that I believed SSDs were the wave of the future and would eventually outright replace disk-based drives (which have been dominant for decades now). My prediction at the time was for five years, and it looks like I might be right, but of course any credit I get for my amazing powers of prognostication depends completely on Jeremy’s memory. If only I had written this down back then…
Just so I get credit this time around, I have been predicting for several months now that the next big technology breakthrough - and I’m talking massive scale here - will be in the area of batteries. Lots of walls start to come down when battery life starts to be measured in weeks instead of hours, without any significant gain in the weight or volume of the batteries, and I think whoever figures that out first has a chance to become a billion-dollar company overnight.
Think about it. You could use a cell phone, with a wireless headset, almost constantly for an entire day (think road trip or remote conference call meeting). Electric and hybrid cars would start to become commercially viable on a meaningful scale. Medical personnel could be field deployed (anything from a Braves game to a county fair to an African jungle) for days. Imagine if this kind of technology had been available when Katrina hit.
The SSD issue dovetails nicely with the battery prediction. Not to bore anybody, but basically the current dominant hard drive technology involves spinning platters and a little arm that reads data off the platters, sort of like an old record player. SSDs don’t have these moving parts, hence “solid” state, giving them several advantages right off the bat - no mechanical problems, less power consumption, and faster seek times (that little delay between when you click on something and it actually comes up on your screen). SSDs are already widely used in the form of USB thumbdrives, and they’re starting to break into the conventional hard drive market now. I think ultimately the platter-based hard drives will be gone and the SSDs will remain.
I also think, once that starts to happen, we’ll see a fundamental change in computer architecture. Right now, we have large-volume hard drives and small-volume “memory”, with the former for retained storage and the latter for volatile stuff, meaning that’s your workspace while the computer is on and goes away when your computer is off. I think the concept of volatile memory will become obsolete with the use of SSDs. Everything will be written to and read from the SSD directly, no need to preload anything. That will also mean no long drawn-out startup and shutdown processes; computers will basically always “sleep” instead of being turned off. If you’ve ever used a Palm Pilot or Pocket PC, you’re familiar with the concept. I guess Macs tend to work like this, too, though I don’t have any real experience with Macs.
We’ll check back in five years to see if I was right.
UPDATE 4/27/2007: Dell must read EGLZFAN.com…