Bob Cringley, of PBS.org column "I, Cringley" lets loose what he's been up to with two titans of hard disk design: Next year we'll see hard drives that use metal foil platters that are smaller, more heat resistent, more shock resistent, and consume 30% less power for roughly 50% the current cost. Tree huggers will love what this will do to power consumption, decreasing fossil fuel usage and global warming by decreasing the amount of carbon in the air. Everyone else will enjoy longer battery life, and more memory in their newly impact resistent laptops, mp3 players, and digital cameras. The loser here? Flash memory. Flash was good because it is faster, more bulletproof and less power hungry than current hard-drives. Take that away and for anything For anything over 2GB, these drives are just too cheap. Aside from flash manufacturers (most of whom also manufacture disk drives) this seems like one of those odd advances in technology that has no real downside. Read the whole column here: Shameless Self-Promotion: Bob's Disk Drive

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