By the spring of 1987, the optical revolution had become a reality. allowed ten times to beat the nearest competitor - Winchester (so they wrote, with a capital letter). Optimem and Verbatim, mind blowers of the time, were preparing prototypes of rewritable optical storage devices, and experts and analysts were making long-term plans. One of the world's pillars of science pop, which is still alive today, Popular Science in the article "Erasable optical disks" did not leave a chance for magnetic recording. The publication ended with a forecast by Professor Bill Meiklejohn, by that time already a former employee of General Electric, who had spent 35 years studying magnetism. In his opinion, devices with magnetic recording had ten years to live, no more.
Verbatim is now into LED lighting and 3D printing raw materials. Many commentators are no longer on the list of the living. And the HDD market is healthy and storage demand is breaking records. The total capacity of hard disks shipped last year exceeded 800 exabytes, three times more than the famous Notre Dame de Paris.
And yet magnetic disks are going away. They leave and take away all the data from the house. Sparing neither a photo from the sea nor a library of science fiction. Where they go is unknown. They will be somewhere high in the mountains and not in our area. In the clouds, to be exact.
Retailers no longer need to market HDDs to the consumer market. Even Western Digital, instead of the flagship brand WD Gold, now sells what has always been under the label - Ultrastar, a reliable and high-quality thing. server device.
By the way, it is thanks to the infusion of fresh HGST blood that the WD server segment demonstrates vitality and . After all, housewives now wear SSDs. However, solid-state development and WD, and Seagate safely "slammed". Then I had to walk, bargain in the market in order to stay there. Seagate took over the SandForce controllers, Western took the whole crop in the bud by buying SunDisk.
Now a marketing wave is working for SSD. But the naive brands of the past, exploiting the predatory essence of the water element (Seagate's Barracuda, WD's Pirahna even earlier) will only be scarecrows in the museum of the technical revolution.
What about HDD? Soon we will forget about them, as we forgot about the magnetic tape? No matter how: we survived the announcements of 100TB drives, we will survive the tiled recording. You won't need it at home anyway.
Source: habr.com