Panasonic Hard Drives

[dillont]

Just a thought...

Is Panasonic positioning itself as a hard drive manufacturer with P2 technology? Right now the sizes are too small and the costs too great - but in 3 years? 5 years? With that chart of projections of the sizes of p2 cards, they will reach 1 TB before 2010.

Is the intent to replace HDD drives in all computerswith P2?

Dillon

[jonahlee]

This doesn't seem like it will ever be a hard drive replacement technology (at least no int he short term) because it is much more expensive, but it is certainly much less likely to take damage, and very fast, so it would be great in laptops.

The thing is as the size of these increase, so do the size of normal hard drives, and the graphic I ahce seen looks like by 2008 they will hit 128GB, and if the same increases continue then it will be 256 by 2009 and 512 by 2010, but also the question if the expense of these drives? Will they continue to drop as quickly as they have, or will they remain very expensive?

Will Panasonic be the only manufacturere or will there be cheaper alternatives from other sources?

[dillont]

I think we're beginning to see the emergence of solid state hard drives right now.

They started with the memory sticks of the digital still cameras.

Solid state hard drives are vastly superior to our standard HDD drives today because they are prone to mechanical failure.

Right now they're expensive, but I would expect them to obey moore's law just like today's hard drives do. Can you imagine archiving all your stuff to P2 (or other similar technology) solid state memory? Instant access to any media/storage you would want, just slip it into a front loading card slot.

I can totally see this happening - but not immediately. But I do think we're seeing the emergence of a new hard drive system being developed.

Dillon

[Barry_Green]

Will Panasonic be the only manufacturere or will there be cheaper alternatives from other sources?
Panasonic will let anyone make it. Whether they'll be cheaper remains to be seen, of course.

[jonahlee]

Is it an open standard, or are their licencing fees for other manufacturers to make P2 cards?

[SergejIvanovits]

Just a thought...

...- but in ...? 5 years?

In 5 years we have something else like a polymer ram or something. You can put all your harddrives on only one "SD" card.

[Barry_Green]

There is some sort of licensing involved. Don't know the details. But I believe that SD is a licensed standard, and there are over 700 companies making products that use SD (or are making SD cards themselves), so it doesn't seem like there'll be any big restrictions.

[jonahlee]

Hmm the future sure looks to be promissing.