When you have had a PC for a while and then you get a Hardware Failure and Lose the Hard Drive. All those programs and games and little apps all have to be setup again. I image my drive regularly but the image failed so I couldn’t easily put things back. You don’t realize how much customization and all those little settings and were you like to keep and put things. That all adds up to a weeks worth of installing and configuring settings and preferences. I had 4 drives in Raid 0 configuration and lost the raid. Couldn’t get the raid to come back online so I had no choice but to reformat and start all over. And when its your gaming computer and you run game servers on it. I was crying at the thought of even doing it ! I let it sit form 3 weeks because I knew it would be a long drawn out process.

They have to find out a way to have a Raid setup with mirroring and not the performance hit you get from mirroring. I think the new way will be the SSD drives they will be self healing and easier to reconstruct. their getting cheaper now. It’s possible to have a 256GB SSD to hold your OS and Apps you use most the time. Use 6GB 7200 RPM old fashioned drives for storage and video or backup. I see a time when a Box will be just that a box. The software and your files will all be on the cloud. You’ll log in an the OS will load of the Web and your files will be their. Hard drives wont be even needed either will SSD’s come to think of it. DOCS 3.1 is coming out next year so average house internet speed will be 500MB to 1GB. We will need all that bandwidth also because with phones, cable boxes, Internet TV’s, Coffee makers, Refrigerators , Alarm systems, Home automation products coming out and all plugged in. We will need the Bandwidth for all these products I know of people already with Cablevision 101mb and they cant watch a movie. Because every kid in the house hold is on the phone, internet, and streaming movies. 

I welcome the day all your software will be delivered over the net no DVD, CD needed. No more updating or installing and it will be cheaper for everyone in the future. Look at Microsoft’s Office 365 for 50 bucks a year you get full office and don’t ever have to update. The full version if you buy it is over 299.00 per license..!  and they save money not having to make and maintain the CD’s, updates, development time is cut in half. Phone’s work all most like that now ! very little OS is on the phone. updates are pushed to you with out you even really knowing about it. Everything will be easier and cheaper but of course we will give up some control for that ease of use. Computer will never screw-up you wont be able to mess with it. You’ll turn it on and it will have been tested and developed way before a release was ever made. Windows has gotten so small compared to the big hog it was and it’s reliable. Windows 8 will run on just about anything and all versions are on one Install DVD. It’s faster on less memory then was needed before but I guess after 20 years computer language has improved allot.