An interesting new data storage technology:
Lai said that in principle, Nanochip could develop the ability to move the probe a single atom at a time. The company said its current generation of probes has a radius smaller than 25nm, but it projects that eventually the probes could be shrunk to two or three nanometers apiece. That scale, said Knight will enable development in 10 to 12 years of a memory chip greater than 1TB. For a first generation, anticipated in 2010, Knight says he expects a small number of chips to be in excess of 100GB, but a more realistic number is "tens of gigabytes" per integrated circuit, a capacity comparable to the current generation of flash devices.
I don't know how long it will take, but I do think that mechanical drives will eventually become obsolete.
To borrow a phrase that was borrowed... "Bring it on!"
They are welcome to my spinning, whirring, head crashing technology any time they want. This is a long overdue breakthrough IMHO.
Aw, but a crashed hard drive is cool to have hanging on your cubicle wall with its guts all hanging out. I'd imagine one day they will be a kitchy relic found in a heap o' junk at an antique shop. They will hang on the wall of some theme restaurant the same way one sees a phonograph bell horn today.
To think that someday we'll look back at this and say "They were so primitive, they scratched their writing on rocks!"