Google Chrome Netbooks - End of the HDD

[crokett]

Article here:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/20/google.os/index.html

Google is developing the Chrome OS that will ship on preloaded Netbooks. The gist of the article is no traditional HDD. The system will use non-volatile (what's there stays there when power is lost) memory to store the OS and most of your data will be stored online. Quite frankly I won't ever run this - I don't want to lose local control of my data.

[BobSch]

Quite frankly I won't ever run this - I don't want to lose local control of my data.

I'm with you. My data stays home, not on some cloud.

[phrog]

Data stored online? I don't think so. I'll go back to pen and paper before I do that.
Richard

[Uncle Cracker]

I also distrust my data stored with a 3rd party. I have the same feeling about online backups, although I can see a certain logic to that.

[leehljp]

This is not the end of the line for HDD, just yet. Too many "young" middle age folks well hooked to HDDs and creating and controlling their own data. Cloud is for the Next Generation. But, the future is about to catch us and passed us by!

While not considered a "netbook" the Apple Macbook Air came with an SSD 2 years ago and has a reasonable following. While Apple never mentioned it, I do think this was part of their plan to see how SSDs and true small portability would be received - as well as pushing computing in that direction. Apple has generally be out in front on radical but practical technology advancement with SCSI, CD drive back in the Apple II, Firewire, USB in mass/standard, doing away with floppy drive and now moving to the SSDs for laptops. Still not cloud though.

It is obvious that it won't make it to this group!

This also brings up a question that I have long had: What makes some advancements successful and other advancements not successful?

[LCHIEN]

while the private individual has little to gain from a netbook with central data storage, and even applications, for businesses and corporations it makes sense.

You hear all the time about people at government agencies and banks and hospitals losing their customer lists and personal/private information on their clients and customers. With a netbook the data never leaves the companies intranet where, lets assume, a company with security in mind has a dedicated network security staff that looks after its VPN, data and backups, so its much more secure than data riding around in someone's backpack at the gym.

Also from an application standpoint, the corporate or institutional organization can make sure the latest apps and security are applied to each netbook and the data it touches.

So there is a valid marketplace for netbooks.

[Rich P]

Before the Apple (and eventually the PC), computing was mainly the big mainframe with the good old dumb green screen CRT (24 lines, 80 characters per line so it could handle a punched card's worth of data I guess). The apps and data lived in the data center not on the desktop. This concentrated power with corporate managers and while they tolerated the Apple the XT was a real threat. I had one boss who actually said he would never allow a PC to be connected to a mainframe. That lasted until the meeting broke up!

If this "cloud" can be used to deliver major functionality through a thin client (netbook + Chrome + browser), especially in the corporate world, it will become widespread. The economics are overwhelmingly in it's favor. However, there will be (at least for some time) apps (like Sketchup, Google Earth, Photoshop, etc.) which I don't think will run well via the Cloud. IMHO, the Cloud is not about data storage, it's about applications. If the data can cost effectively move there it will. After all, why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?

Just my $.02.

[dbhost]

With all the privacy regulation out there, I don't see this as something that is easily workable by IT departments, and honestly, the fight to get past Microsoft on the corporate desktop has been going on now since the first Linux distributions were released...

The loss of a local hard disk is not a good or bad thing, it just is. There are advantages both ways...

Honestly, with bandwidth being what it is... and media intensive applications and personal electronics being so pervasive, I do not see this being widely adopted on a consumer level.

[catta12]

It sounds good...in theory. But, With all the gripes about bandwidth usage this is going to cause even more problems. My problem is that if your internet connection is down you are hosed. At least with a local network you can still access your data offline.

[dkerfoot]

If you start to think of it as an enhanced smart phone, it starts to make sense. I think the target demographic is generation text...

[cgallery]

Then there is the fact that corporations w/ the best intentions still lose data. Like Microsoft's recent fiasco.

I guess I wouldn't mind trusting my data to google, as long as I still had a way to plug in a USB drive and back it up myself.

[LCHIEN]

Then there is the fact that corporations w/ the best intentions still lose data. Like Microsoft's recent fiasco.

I guess I wouldn't mind trusting my data to google, as long as I still had a way to plug in a USB drive and back it up myself.

I'm not really that good at backing up my data. I suspect it's safer at google than on my system.

[MilDoc]

Not for me. I have 3 backups:

First a raid 1 array, 2nd drive an automatic mirror of the first.

Second an ioSafe fire and waterproof drive with a 5 year data recovery service, backed up to every 2-3 days.

Third, a USB drive also backed up to every 2-3 days and kept in a separate fireproof safe in my single car sized detached workshop.

Backups are automatic to both 2 & 3 - run the program, go have supper.

I'm obsessive about this since I once had one drive that crashed and was completely nonrecoverable by a data recovery service, at a cost of $500 to try to recover it.

Besides, I have government secrets and plans for a colony on Mars I have to keep safe........

[LinuxRandal]

Put the tech out there and see how it flies.

This won't eliminate personal storage by any means, as you have USB hard drives, flash drives, etc. I believe the second issue of Ubuntu User (read about it online, can't find a copy), has an article on Cloud computing, and the software that a couple of companies (Canonical and Google) are making available so you have your own cloud.
But to me, this is just an expansion of old tech; terminal serving. Now with our ability to have the OS on a boot chip, and removable memory, this makes more sense. Would I trust others with my data, no, but I won't have to.

I only hope this is more adaptable then the current OS on a chip that I dealt with. With that one, you can't do simple things like set your default home page, yet somethings it keeps. I have looked at a couple others, but I don't think we are there yet. (needs to be adaptable and someway of updating the OS)

[Alex Franke]

Online backups are perfectly safe for most users and most data. Most people forget that files are very highly encrypted before they even leave your computer to get stored online. (I've been using carbonite.com for a while now and I'm very happy with it.)

I don't know if this is how Google's online storage might work, but I would hope they keep security in mind.

That said, now which one of you got a hold of my credit card number and started buying all kinds of fancy tools? (j/k)