THE HARD-DISK DRIVE AND THE FLASH-MEMORY CARD: Two Rapidly Growing Technologies That Are Remaking the Consumer Electronics Industry

摘要

In 1998, two new products were introduced that were soon to exert immense influence in the consumer electronics industry. The first was a new video recording system introduced by a startup company called TiVo. It was unique in that it used an internal 20GB hard-disk drive, rather than tape, as the recording medium. The second new product was IBM's tiny "Microdrive", a hard-disc drive little larger than a postage stamp and weighing only 16 grams. These developments ushered in the era of consumer audio-video products that incorporated hard-disk drives as their main means of recording, an era that had already had a significant influence on the consumer electronics industry by the end of 2004, and promised to usher in far greater changes in the second half of the decade. During this same period, the rapid improvements in the cost and storage capacities of flash-memory devices has made possible the introduction of many new consumer electronics products. These improvements, and those being made in hard-disk-drive technology, promise literally to remake many aspects of the consumer-electronics industry. This article takes a look at both the recent history of hard-disk and flash-memory technology, and how their further development and utilization will benefit the end user during the second half of this decade.