Your hard drive is now obsolete

Gary Krakow Columnist • E-mail

LAS VEGAS - Twenty years ago I got my first home computer. It was an Apple Macintosh that someone had modified. They had installed a third-party device called a hard drive, which meant that the computer didn’t need floppy disks to boot up.  Those early hard drives were large in size, wildly expensive and had storage capacities in megabytes — not gigabytes.  

The rest, as they say is history. Over the years, hard drives have gotten smaller in size, bigger in capacity and a whole lot cheaper. A one-terabyte (1,000 gigabyte) drive was announced here at CES this week.

But mechanically, hard drives haven’t changed much over the years. They still have a lot of moving parts. And, as I can report from personal experience, at some point, all hard drives fail.  These are not pleasant memories.

So, when I saw one particular announcement at a show filled with press releases, I got very, very excited: SanDisk Corporation has introduced a 32GB, 1.8-inch solid-state drive (SSD) which is built to be a drop-in replacement for standard mechanical hard disk drives. This means the device has no moving parts.

Large capacity flash-based drives had been used primarily in the military, aerospace and telecom industries which demanded high performance, reliable storage under demanding conditions. But these drives were very expensive. Now, with flash-memory costs dropping, solid-state drives are becoming economically and commercially viable.

SanDisk Look ma, no disks.

In addition to being reliable, these drives are fast. SanDisk claims a sustained read rate of 62 megabytes per second and a random read rate of 7,000 inputs/outputs per second. In plain English, that means it’s more than 100 times faster than most current hard disk drives.

I can’t begin to tell you what this ultimately means for the computer, PDA, cell phone and portable music device industries. The only thing that might slow down SSD acceptability is the price. Currently, SanDisk’s 32GB SSD will sell for $600. But, I would expect that price will drop as more and more companies choose solid-state drives. A number of electronics manufacturers are currently in talks with SanDisk — although they wouldn’t yet disclose which ones.

Massive flat-screen debuts
No Consumer Electronics Show would be complete without some company boasting that they’ve created the world’s largest flat-screen TV.

Sharp USA You can't really gauge how large this TV is until you stand next to it.

This year’s prize goes to Sharp with their 108-in (diagonally measured) Aquos LCD TV.  I can report that the TV displayed a wonderfully sharp and clear picture. I’d love to test it in my living room though to put it through its paces. I’ll forward my address to Sharp as soon as I get home!

I didn’t ask how much the TV weighs but I know I would not want to try to lift it by myself — or even with two other people. I did ask about the price.  The official response was that the price has not yet been set.  I need to buy a new car so I didn’t try to nail them down any further.

For those keeping track, LG was showing a 100-inch plasma while most of the largest plasma screens measure only 105-inches. 

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