As a comment to my post last month about hard drive speeds, Waldo made a comment about the potential impact of Solid State Drives (SSDs) to change the mainstream data storage paradigm.  I agree that SSDs have significant potential and will become increasingly important.  As computers become more ubiquitous:  more transportable, more hold-able, more wearable, etc., the benefits of solid state storage – lighter, smaller, more durable – will become more relevant.  In addition, SSDs are much faster that hard drives.

However, at the same time people will are using more and more data which will further expose the weakness of SSD:  their cost per unit storage is significantly higher that hard drives.

So how can you have the best of both worlds?  Imagine a mobile device, like a mobile phone or a laptop, with a SSD (or just a lot of solid state storage).  Now imagine that mobile device also has a high speed wireless data connection to a Dispersed Storage network.  In this approach, the SSD is a fast, huge storage cache while the dsNet provides massive, reliable secondary storage.  With this approach, you get fast access in a small, light and durable device while having access to unlimited storage on a dsNet.  And if you lost your mobile device, you could connect a new mobile device (or two or five) to you data on the dsNet and never lose a bit.

The pieces to put this together will all be available this year.  Anyone want to port the dsNet client to their phone?