The long life of the hard disk

It was in 1983 that IBM introduced the IBM XT -- the IBM PC with the built-in hard disk. While hard disks had been around for years, the IBM XT made them visible to the vast PC market. Hard disks were expensive, so there was a lot of advertising and also a lot of articles about the benefits of hard disks.

Those benefits were: faster operations (booting PC-DOS, loading programs, reading and writing files, more secure because you can't lose the disk like a floppy, and more reliable compared to floppy disks.

The hard disk didn't kill floppy disks. They remained popular for some time. Floppy disks disappeared some time after Apple introduced the iMac G3 (in 1998). Despite Apple's move, floppies remained popular.

Floppy disks did gradually lose market share, and in 2010 Sony stopped manufacturing floppy disks. But hard disks remained a staple of computing.

Today, in 2023, the articles are now about replacing hard disks with solid-state disks. The benefits? Faster boot times, faster program loading times, faster reading and writing. (Sound familiar?) Reliability isn't an issue, nor is the possibility of losing media.

Apple again leads the market in moving from older storage technology. Their product line (from iPhones and iPads to MacBooks and iMacs) all use solid-state storage. Microsoft is moving in that direction too, pressuring OEMs and individuals to configure PCs to boot Windows from an internal SSD rather than a hard disk. It won't be long before hard disks are dropped completely and not even manufactured.

But consider: the hard disk (with various interfaces) was the workhorse of storage for PCs from 1983 to 2023 -- forty years.

Floppy disks (in the PC world) were used from 1977 to 2010, somewhat less than forty years. But they were used prior to PCs, so maybe their span was also forty years.

Does that mean that SSDs will be used for forty years? We've had them since 1978 (if you count the very early versions) but they moved into the main stream of computing in 2017 with Intel's Optane products. Forty years after 2017 puts us in 2057. But that would be the end of SSDs -- their replacement should arrive earlier than that, possibly fifteen years earlier.