Not surprised they are dropping teeny tiny drives. The law of diminishing returns comes into play here. Why squish all that R&D into an ever smaller space when a larger drive will benefit from the increase in tolerances and related tech?

Besides which, mechanical devices are so last century. No moving parts is the wave of the future, baby.

... given the fact that they were already two generations behind Toshiba.

Who wants clunky mechanical drives as a main system device anyway, if i had a choice between booting from ram or booting from hdd, then its a no brainer, ram wins, its so simple to bolt a memory controller to a bit of board and make it sata or pci, leave the spinning noisy things for archive.

Yes ram can lose its data, but with a clunker as backup, it can restore in a few seconds.

gigabyte make a ramdisk, but its just not cost effective at £99 unpopulated (ram box)

Are we really looking at the end of spinning data? How will the Government make press releases......?

Right, out of the storage farm and off to the funny farm for me.

They seem to be hurting a lot - they're getting out of TVs as well...

Stories like this make me fondly remember the days of the Z80 based fight-out which Acorn winally won. I had (and still have) a Memotech which was far superior to the Acorn and had an SDX option which was a 3.5" floppy drive with built in RAM and when you put in a floppy it would instantly dump the contents down to RAM and work from there.

the conventional iPod's days are numbered

I don't care much at all what happens to the portable music whassits (512mb of flash is plenty for me...) but I am a fan of tiny laptops. And those tend to use 1.8 inch drives. I don't see flash as a reasonable laptop storage device yet, since the size and price haven't really gotten to the right point, and I'd be rather sad to see spinning drives leave the ultra portable range.

And booting a computer that should use a 1.8 inch hdd from ram doesn't make sense at all, for a number of reasons. I mean in order for the 'restore in a matter of seconds' thing to work, you have to have a known good image of the ram on your magnetic storage, meaning that you have to sync it before you shut down (IE suspend to disc - people do that all the time already) or you have to leave the boot ram totally unmodified, which is just not useful in the least. Plus there is size, secondary battery, and cost to consider, none of which will help for laptops that generally weigh under 3 pounds and cost over $2000 USD with a standard, cheap harddrive.

And if the comments were just generally aimed towards the end of spinning magnetic storage... well then you're just terribly misguided. Its going to be a long time before anyone can cram 3TB of raid5 flash or ram into a fileserver for a reasonable price, which is trivial with standard disks.