mahony

Hello Cloud Storage, Goodbye Consumer Hard Disk Drives

I'm a big believer in Cloud Theory; however, the doom of the local hard drive is not nigh (yet). There are several factors that will delay the cloudburst.

1) NAS hard drive type storage is still very cheap and paying a monthly bill like a cell phone to store 500GB of pictures is still a mental stretch for people

2) Most people's connections are still far too slow to work with gigabytes of data on a regular basis

3) Rapidly dropping prices of high-density storage media (sd cards, memory sticks etc.) and the ability to access them without internet connectivity makes them far more useful in the near term (I know this is similar to #1 above)

4) The Cloud effect was EMC's dream-come-true in 2000 (they didn't call it that, but it's what they preached) and yet even coroporations haven't moved into the cloud by 2009, so I think it will take consumers a fair bit of time before they will jump into cloud computing in a big way.