>Hmmmm... So, why do hard drives need to have heads, etc.? Why not just make hard drives from memory? Cost? WHy?

They're coming... recently you've no doubt seen mention of "hybrid drives", which are part traditional HD and part RAM (of some kind). This is different than on-board cache because the data is actually stored in the RAM part permanently.
Back in the 80s IBM offered a "solid state drive" for its mainframes, but it was hugely expensive and also tiny compared to regular HDs.

To me the real problem is that these USB flash drives ever included "drive" in their name, which I guess was done because they used a FAT scheme to store the data on them. To me they are not "drives", but rather storage devices meriting a new nomenclature.

A HD "needs" to have heads and rotation in order to be a "hard drive". Without thos things it is something else. It is only recently that large GB amounts could be stored in a small space using electronics alone.
There is also the problem of persistence - keeping the data intact in a non-powered situation. To date that has proven problematic but the existence of hybrids suggests that it is solved (or nearly so). A true HD stores its data indefinitely without the need for power.

My bet is that, within 5 years, all new PCs will be delivered with large amounts of electronic storage as well as huge HDs for user data.


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>>>Why do you need a flash drive to get the performance? Can't it just use a portion of the hard drive?
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>>There are a couple of reasons that come to mind, Jay...
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>>1) Using the HD, you'd just be adding more traffic/contention to an already critical component;
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>>2) Flash drives to not have head movement and rotational latency, which are big factors when a HD is used.
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>>>>I've been using Vista for about a month now, and (knock on wood) it's been great. (either that, or I've been extremely lucky).
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>>>>My new laptop has 2 GB of memory, but I recently learned of the ReadyBoost feature in Vista. I found a 2GB ReadyBoost flash drive at a local store for about $30, so I grabbed it. My laptop was pretty speedy before, but it's even faster now - I can actually tell the difference with the naked eye when I load several apps. So if you're a Vista user and don't mind giving up one of your ports, give it a try.
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>>>>Kevin