Near Future

 
     Hard drives are becoming smaller and less likely to break down.  New types of storage and new types of hard drives have been created and are a link to the future.  Perpendicular storage has been developed and it stores the data perpendicularly in the disk.  This creates a north and south pole inside the disk itself.  This type of storage allows more data to be stored onto the hard drive.  Besides this new type of storage, we also have serial ATA (SATA) available.  ATA stands for Advanced Technology Attachment and it is a disk drive tool.  SATA is a new way of connecting your hard drive to your computer.  There are other ways of connecting HDDs to your computer, but SATA is a faster solution.

     Another advancement in hard drive technology is solid state drives.  You may have seen the acronym SSD, and this mean solid state drive.  Solid state hard drives don't have moving parts in them and they are less likely to break down compared to traditional hard drives.  Flash drives are similar to SSDs in a sense that they don't have moving parts (semiconductors rather than magnetic media), but the difference is that flash drives are external drives and are made to plug into the computer while SSDs are made to stay inside the computer.

   There are always pros and cons to something and SSDs have some good pros but also some cons as well.  The pros are that there is no initial spin-up in the solid state hard drive so it starts faster.  Since there are no moving parts inside, the SSDs will barely make any noise and they consume less power.  Plus, SSDs are very light and laptop users can greatly benefit from this as well as astronauts in space with hard drives in their spaceship.  These extremely light hard drives can allow the spaceship to be less heavy and in turn enable the space users to use less fuel in space.  Some cons of SSDs are that there is a high cost per gigabyte when purchasing these solid state drives.  These hard drives also have high security which is not good when a user is trying to retrieve any accidentally deleted data.