Jeremy A. Kaplan
FoxNews.com
12/9/2010
Stop worrying about when the hard drive in your computer will die. Google wants to kill it permanently anyway.
The new Google Chrome operating system, which was unveiled Tuesday, as well as hints and suggestions from Apple and Microsoft, offers us a preview of the PC of the future. And it will come without that familiar whirring disk that has been the data heart of the PC for the past 25 years.
The Chrome OS will at first be available on all-black laptops from Samsung and Acer. And because the new platform stores everything — files, applications, data bits and bytes, literally everything — on online servers rather than on your home or office PC, those new PCs running it won’t require gobs of storage. In fact, they won’t require any storage at all.
The new Google laptops come without hard drives, in other words.
Other hardware manufacturers have seen the trend, too: The ebook readers from Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t have hard drives. (And digital books you buy from Google’s brand new eBooks store are stored online as well.) The Apple iPad has no drive, and the newest MacBook Air laptop skips a hard drive entirely as well; they all rely on flash memory chips for storage.
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