CRN’s Ten Biggest Storage Stories? … maybe SSD Hybrid was number 11

CRN released its top 10 storage stories of the year, and if you look at the list you got:

• HP acquires 3Par
• Market rebound and huge growth
• The rise of Cloud Storage
• EMC acquires Isilon
• The rise of SSD
• Data protection software market consolidation
• Cisco’s Unified Computing System
• Startups rise to the task
• Dedupe goes mainstream
• Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence converge

All worthy of their positions on the list, but what about the resurgence of Hybrid drive technology?  Sure, SSD has had the media and analysts buzzing as companies like Apple embrace SSD in notebooks like the MacBook Air, and enterprise behemoths like IBM and EMC incorporate SSD in arrays, but does this adoption indicate the ultimate doom to the hard drive?  Not according to iSuppli.

As CRN points out, hard drive companies like Seagate have embraced SSD and have launched such products in the enterprise space. But, at the same time, Seagate has introduced a potential interim solution:  Hybrid drives: part SSD & part hard drive.  You get the best of both worlds – the near speed of an SSD with the capacity and price of a hard drive.  Isn’t this worthy of an honorable mention, at least #11 on the list?  It’s safe to say that Hybrid is not a flash in the pan “tweener” technology, but potentially the future of disk drive technology, and since disk drives are going to be around for the foreseeable future, this may be a technology to bet on.

I think I’ll make my own list of the top storage stories for 2010… look for that in a future post.

Related Posts:

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A tablet with a side of storage please
RAID’ng Momentus XT? Looks like a no-brainer
Seagate talks hybrid technology on Computer Outlook radio
Momentus XT vs Momentus PSD – there’s a huge difference
Momentus XT – what the experts are saying