The End Is Near...

For hard disk drives, that is.

The original electronic computers of the late 1940s and early 1950s had hundreds and hundreds of moving parts. The systems I worked on while I was in the U.S. Navy had reduced this to dozens of moving parts – lots of mechanical switches, some relays, cooling blowers (powerful fans), and large hard disks (the size of washing machines) and tape drives (the size of refrigerators) each of which had dozens of motors, actuators, gears, dashpots, capstans, etc.

Once the electronics themselves moved from vacuum tubes to solid state (transistors and integrated circuits), by far the most likely thing to break in a computer was a moving part. In the 1970s, as a data systems tech in the Navy, I spent much of my life cleaning, repairing, lubricating, and adjusting things that moved. The only other common failure was high-voltage solid state electronics, which in those days was still in its infancy. Basically, the fewer moving parts something had, the more reliable it was.

These days, a modern PC generally only has two kinds of moving parts (not counting mouse and keyboard): fans and hard disk drives. Modern direct current fans are very reliable, but they do occasionally still break. Hard disk drives are notorious amongst IT professionals for being the most likely source of problems on a PC. But solid state disk drives have been (a) small, and (b) outrageously expensive.

That's changing, and very quickly. Toshiba is about to introduce a 512GB solid state disk drive – bigger than the hard disk installed on most PCs. It will be pricey – but not outrageously so, and (like all electronic devices) that price will come down rapidly as competitors come on line and production volumes ramp up.

The hard disk is about to become a museum display. I give it 5 years at most, and possibly as little as 2 years.

The only moving part left will be the fan – and as low power electronics get better and better (which they are), the need for these will taper off and eventually disappear altogether...