There are a lot of important advancements that take the status quo and massage it. For example, see the picture at right: A large (4G or so) hard drive that’s coin sized. Wow.

On the other hand, consider the same drive from an evolutionary standpoint.

It’s a Winchester Drive (I wish I knew the origin of this phrase; I don’t. Who/what is Winchester?). These have been used since the 1980s (at least); each year, the drives get smaller and the controllers get smarter.

When I first worked with such a storage device, it was for a library computer the size of a conventional desk, and the drives were Winchester but sorta (?) swappable. Each Monday, the two large platter drives (the size of deli platters) were rotated, and one taken off-site (early “back up”).

Today, smaller, denser, more efficient (pixie dust and all that)…but the same as yesterday.

Today, hard drives are evolutionary.

We need storage medium that is revolutionary.

Flash RAM and so on. Moving parts do not make it in a solid state world.

I love what Toshiba is doing. But would it not be better without moving parts??