Speaking of the past, today is The Storage Network’s first birthdayIn fact, the first post was exactly on January 4 last year and has been followed by many more.I want to thank all the people who helped this Weblog become popular. Their help was very much needed, because The Storage Insider is open to anybody who has something to say about storage, and wants to bring together the many voices that populate the storage world, including the opinions of vendors, readers and, why not, mine. Back to the title, here is an e-mail exchange with Curtis Maurand, an experienced system administrator and network engineer.Curtis was answering to my Storage insider columm:” Will Seagate’s acquisition of Maxtor spell trouble for its rivals?”Curtis: Probably not. Samsung’s new 32GB flash controller is about to make harddrives a thing of the past or just for archival storage. Too many things to break.me: You don’t really believe that, Curtis, do you? Curtis: Yes I do. 5% of the power and no moving parts. And its faster than a harddrive. Systems are constantly waiting for the drives because no matter how fast they are, they’re pathetically slow when compared to the rest of the system. It’s a no brainer. Here is a link to the press releases and why I think Harddrives will become a thing of the past.me(still playing the devil advocate): OK, I am with you: Memory is faster and more reliable than harddrives, but is enormously more expensive, isn’t it? Also that press release refers to consumer electronics not to enterprise products. I would like to see one of the EMC or Hitachi big boxes filled with the Samsung cards instead of drives but we are not quite there yet, are we? Curtis: No, but it’s around the corner. According to Samsung, this new Nand technology is going to reduce capacity/price ratio to that of existing harddrives. Currently it is much more expensive and one of the articles that I read discussed that issue. What Samsung has done is nothing short of revolutionary. The capacities will go up even higher when they go to 50 nm or 30 nm processes.I need to hear also your voice in this debate: are disk drives about to become obsolete?