Computersight -

You know what a hard drive is, right? In terms of what is going to happen in the future, there is now a huge debate going on in the computing industry. That is, whether or not desktop personal computers should remain as they are now – general purpose and standalone – or become part of a managed network resource.

Often at work at the moment, software is loaded on the hard drive of PCs. There is a move now towards applications being hosted at a central location. This does not have to be in the MIS (Management Information Systems) department of where you work. It could even be at the website of the company that you bought your software from. So, for instance, imagine you working at your desk and accessing Word for Windows directly from the Microsoft website.

Why do this? People who are for central hosting often compare the computer to the telephone. When you pick up your phone you dial a number and talk to the person you have phoned. When have you ever had to reboot your telephone? When have you ever had to install software on it? So, why not have all the productivity you expect of a PC at your desk but without the bothersome space consuming base unit?

If your PC crashes, then all you would have to do is to find another computer with internet access and you can get hold of all your information. This would extend to the files you are working on right up to things like your calendar and your address book.

With centralized processing an organization can spend their entire IT budget on a single, very powerful processing system. As it is all centralized it would also, potentially, be easier to troubleshoot. That is, if there are problems they should be easier to locate. The system should be a simpler system.

On the downside, a central system has a single point of failure. You also have to wait for upgrades until the company decides to implement it. Finally, the end user may find it difficult to customize. Whereas not many would weep at the absence of their favourite screen saver, when it comes to software (for example, customizing the Word menus and buttons) it might cause a lot of complaints.

If centralized processing does not kill of the hard drive, then Flash memory just might. The prices of flash memory have crashed over the last few years and are now the portable storage medium that most people use. Could it replace the hard drive? Well, Samsung recently launched some computer products in Korea using SSDs (which stands for Solid State Drive) rather than the more conventional magnetic hard drive. These flash drives read data faster and save much faster than the traditional 24mb that an old fashioned hard drive can offer. In other words, you can load up your computer faster, access your applications faster and save faster. If you want to be green, then the SSD is also better – it uses a quarter of the power of a traditional hard drive. Finally, if you are still fed up with your PC’s hard drive making a noise, relief is here. Due to its lack of moving parts, a SSD make NO NOISE whatsoever.

The downside is that SSDs are still very expensive when it comes to storage. A gigabyte of SSD memory storage is still about twenty times as expensive as a magnetic drive. Although this price will go down, it will take some time.

Time is a great teller. One way or another, the days seem to be numbered for the traditional hard drive.