Computerworld predicts the obvious, that being Apple is sounding the death knell of hard drives :

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week introduced a slimmer version of the MacBook Air, an ultra-portable laptop without a traditional hard disk drive, he said it represents "the future of notebooks." Several industry observers agree.

Beginning with MP3 players, NAND flash technology in the form of solid state drives (SSD) has been devouring the consumer hard drive market from the bottom up as prices go down.

And, while hard disk drives will still populate servers and storage systems in corporate data centers for years to come, there will be fewer of them as solid state drives cannibalize the top tiers of data storage there.

Of course Solid-state drives will be the future. There are really is no down-side to them besides cost. They are more rugged than hard-drives, faster, silent, smaller and have far lower power-consumption than hard drives. What’s not to like?

But Apple has - historically speaking - always led the way in the computer industry. Many things all computer users take for granted are Apple inventions, such as the track pad. And we wouldn’t be using USB today had it not been for Apple.

Truly, it has been said if you want to know what the rest of the industry will be doing next year, look to Apple this year. Still, that doesn’t mean anyone is going to listen. After all, even when Apple held a funeral for Mac OS 9, it took some Mac developers years to get the hint.

We believe it will be inevitable that the industry shift to SSDs. The only question to be answered is : how long will it take?

Tags: hard drive, dead, Solid-state, flash, Change