Lament for the hard drive

Where are our petabyte drives? Brian Hayes takes us through the reasons storage is "stuck" in the low terabytes. The tl;dr is that we got such exceptional capacity growth in the late 90s and early 00s we don't need much more right now, so the focus since then has been on SSDs, networking, interfaces, etc, which address performance bottlenecks. A great line: "Maybe in a decade or two the spinning disk will make a comeback, the way vinyl LPs and vacuum tube amplifiers have. Data that comes off a mechanical disk has a subtle warmth and presence that no solid-state drive can match."

Odd memory: my first story at Wired involved interviewing Mark Kryder.