One of the bottlenecks with computers today is pulling data off a hard drive, or writing data onto the hard drive. At the core of your hard drives is a spinning platter. Because the computer has to wait for the platter to spin around to the right place, and for the head to get to the correct grove, the computer has to wait a long time to get or store data on a hard drive.
In the future it appears hard drives will be replaced with Solid State Drives, or SSD. These are basically a collection of memory chips which retain the information after the power goes off. Currently they cost much more per Gig than hard drives, but the price per Gig is falling faster for SSD than hard drives, so the industry expect a big switch in a couple years. When this happens the performance increase of our computers will be huge. Boot up times may be in microseconds, instead of tens of seconds.
Seagate may bring some of the benefits of SSDs sooner that most of us expected. Seagate Demos First Hybrid Hard Drive explains:
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On Monday, Seagate released details of a new hybrid Flash memory-hard disk drive, which is intended to significantly boost performance of notebook computers.
The drives combine a traditional 250, 350 or 500 GB spinning platter drive (HDD) with 4 GB of single-level cell Flash memory, which is intended to be more reliable than cheaper varieties of flash memory. (Seagate says it has tested its SLC flash to levels reached after 5 years of use and found no degradation of performance or data loss.)
The result is a combined drive that approaches the performance of solid state drives, but at a fraction of the price. According to Seagate's own tests, the Momentus XT is 80% faster than a traditional notebook hard drive, and 20% faster than an ultra high-performance 10,000 RPM HDD.
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It is just such an amazing world.
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