Hardware Vendors Face a Storm of Uncertainty - Page 2

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3: Mass storage gets more massive

The first hard drive I ever owned was 50 megabytes in capacity. Today, about the only thing I download smaller than that is a Word doc or Powerpoint file. With people generating so much digital content, mostly thanks to music and DVD ripping and digital cameras and camcorders, terabyte hard drives are not only common, they are getting cheap.

Prices on Pricewatch.com reflect a plunge in large capacity drives, with 1TB drives now very close to under $100. Many computers come with two drives in them, for 2TB of total capacity. Specialty Windows Home Server computers can store up to 5TB of data.

Also taking the plunge are SSD drives. When 32GB and 64GB SSD drives first hit, they commanded a steep $600 or more. Now they can be had for under $100. The plunge in price will make them much more palatable to laptop customers, who will find their low power draw and cool running to be worth the now lower premium price.

After conquering the mobile market, SSD could move to enterprise storage next as an alternative to the high speed drives used in a RAID setting. Unlike a drive, which has to spin up, flash has no latency, no delay in reading and writing. But SSD/flash is still unproven in the enterprise, so adoption will be slow as companies take some time to field test them.

In addition to internal storage, we've seen a burst in the advent of external storage drives, with 320GB to 500GB drives in a case that plugs into the USB port, thus sparing people the headache of opening their computer to add storage. Also, we're seeing a growth in off-set storage and Internet backup, from Amazon S3, Carbonite and Box.net. Expect more cloud storage efforts in the coming year.

4: Here comes 64-bit

With memory at radically cheaper levels, vendors have been beefing up standard memory levels. And the benefits are a lot more obvious than say, processors with more cores. Is a dual-core 2.8GHz chip, for example, faster than a quad-core 2.4GHz chip?

But it's easy to differentiate between 2GB, 4GB and 8GB of memory. An increasing number of vendors, led by HP, are releasing 8GB machines. However, 32-bit Windows can only address 4GB of memory. The solution? System makers are starting to opt for 64-bit Windows Vista. Microsoft estimates that the population of 64-bit users visiting Windows Update in October of this year was almost 20 percent. It was single digit at the beginning of the year.

Microsoft is on record as saying that Windows 7, its successor to the maligned Vista, will come in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, so it's not abandoning 32-bit computers yet, even though 32-bit processors have been off the primary market since 2006 or so. Most of the third-party hardware vendors have caught up and make both 32- and 64-bit drivers. Expect more pre-built systems to come with 64-bit Windows, Vista and 7, and loaded with 8GB of memory.

Microsoft emphasized 64-bit support at all of its recent developer shows and wants more vendor support, but it should look at the software section, too. A notably absent 64-bit piece of software: Adobe's Flash player. Even if Microsoft and Adobe are not likely to be exchanging Christmas cards, they need to work together on this.