Despite the success of optical disc formats like CD and DVD the future points towards devices that incorporate Hard Disk Drives (note the difference in spelling ‘disc’ and ‘disk’). This touches on the topic of convergence that I wrote on in my last post. Why load in a movie one-at-a-time if you can just preload your DVD jukebox with 100 movies?

If you think that 10 years from now people will be storing their movies and music on little shiny discs then you must not have noticed how cheap Hard Drives have become. Today you can buy a 250GB drive for $120. If you needed any more evidence that the future is tied up in Hard Drives, Apple has just applied for a patent to protect iPod drives from falling on the ground.

“The portable-computing device protects its disk drive by monitoring for such accelerations and operating to avoid usage of the disk drive during periods of acceleration,” Apple said in the patent application, which was published Dec. 16. “Through such protection, the likelihood of damage to the disk drive or loss of data stored on the disk drive is able to be substantially reduced.”

Removing the weaknesses of spinning media (and moving parts) is one of the last hurdles towards ubiquitous hard drives in all portable devices. Flash memory drives solve this problem by having no moving parts at all (like the CompactFlash and Memory Stick drives in digital cameras) but are much more expensive than standard issue computer hard drives.