Loading Speed as the Next Big Computing Milestone

This makes a lot of sense, with rapidly advancing displays giving non-tech-savvy individuals an easy way to appreciate progress. Today, however, the biggest leaps aren't found in display technology, but rather in storage speed. It's been an interesting journey and one which is shaping up to set the tone for years to come.

A Start in  Display

If you're old enough to have been around in the time of monochrome displays, chances are you remember the astonishing leaps which followed. From MDA which only supported text, we moved on to the absurdly powerful ability to display 16 colors at 160x200 pixels with CGA. Following that was EGA, which upper resolutions to 640x350. Soon superseded by VGA, SVGA, and more, every step offered new opportunities, and each could be noticed at a glance.

In a more modern sense, upgrades in displays have reached a sort of plateau, where it's increasingly difficult for those not familiar with the intricacies of graphics tech to notice a difference. The leaps and bounds in this area have been replaced with small steps, but the same can't be said for all of computing's components.

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A Limit on Loading

Traditional hard drives aren't as much of an evolving technology as the industry's continual progress might imply. The very first of modern mechanical commercial systems arrived in 1956 from IBM and essentially operated in the same way as rotary drives still do. The only real difference is that these drives were much larger, heavier, slower, and more expensive. The original IBM drives cost around $10,000 per megabyte. Compare this to a modern drive that offers a cost of around $0.03 per gigabyte, and the difference is night and day. The problem here is that these are still using moving, spinning parts, and like CDs, there's a strict limit on how fast drives can safely spin.

Getting Ahead

Modern storage drives adopt technologies with no moving parts, and for this reason, former mechanical limitations on speed no longer apply. For reference here, an old 7200 RPM mechanical hard drive can deliver a read/write speed of about 60-160 MB/s. A cutting-edge solid-state solution like that in the PlayStation 5 can achieve speeds of 5,500 MB/s.

In real terms, changes like these mean a difference between a computer taking minutes to load versus being completely useable within a matter of seconds. While the efficiency advantages of this are clear, just as important is the relationship this change has with our increasingly fast-paced modern society. With faster computers, faster internet, and better AI, the need for speed has affected almost all parts of our computing life, and in more ways than we think.

A popular example could be found in how online businesses like digital casinos operate. These are developed to load quickly on modern devices and connections, from the website themselves to the library of games. Even payouts in many of these major casinos have been built around instant access, bolstered by bonuses like free spins and deposit matches. Readers can get more information about it here, but suffice to say, a modern business like this embraces speed at every point.

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Though mechanical drives still have advantages in terms of cost to storage capacity ratios, the increasing difficulty they have with modern demands places them firmly on the way out. Simply put, we've moved beyond what older storage drives can offer, and like the CGA monitors of old, these are likely to eventually move from useful tools to collector's items. It might have taken over six decades, but for computer technology, that's an impressive lifespan nonetheless.

Micah Soto

Update 27 June 2021