Almost definitely not at all. There's just too much latency, due to the speed of light. Local storage will always be faster than cloud, by a huge margin, unless you're using an incredibly slow medium.
Yep, SSD latency is measured in tens of microseconds. To achieve that kind of latency with a cloud service, you'd need it to be just a few kilometers away or the light propagation delay alone becomes too great.
Idea: In the future where wireless network speeds are high, the OS image just gets loaded into RAMdisk each time.
Marketing: You get the newest OS image on every boot, with all current security patches and no (3rd party) malware, as that would be wiped with each reboot. This will also allow for even higher performance than any SSD.
It better keep a local backup so it can boot in low coverage areas. Of course that would mildly compromise the security aspect
You can take my 100TB storage array from my cold, dead, hands.
Can I really? I won't murder you for it, I am willing to wait.
Oh don't worry, they'll cite "national security concerns" and claim that you are storing stolen classified information in order to plan for "terrorist activity".
There will be a no knock warrant, they'll kick open the door, shoot anything that moves. And they will take it away from your cold, dead, hands.
Or more likely, desktop OSes will be locked down and will simply not be able to use it, while bank websites and other stuff will only work with locked down OSes.
For your security of course.
have you tried moving to Linux?
Cant move to linux when in 2030 they make every BIOS/UEFI locked, just like some android manufacturers have already been locking bootloaders.
Then don't buy those products. I only buy phones I can unlock and install my own version of Android on. Same with computers and iot. If I can't install my own software then I didn't own it.
If megacorps have their way, you won't be able to use banking, government, social media, etc. if you aren't running their proprietary slop.
See Google's Attestation API attempt. Computers can become like smsrtphones are right now.
You can always have a burner "secure" device for official business, and a privacy-respecting device for everything else.
I mean, imagine a future where every computer is just a chromebook, phones are no longer phones but just a “terminal” that streams the actual OS which runs in the cloud.
It will get close to happening for nearly all computing, then it will swing back the other way to local storage and compute, then after 15-20 years it will swing back toward centralized compute and storage. This has already happened 3 times.
Original computing was mainframes. "Dumb terminals" that had zero local storage and only the most rudimentary compute power to handing the incoming data and display it, and take keystrokes, encode them, and send them on.
Then "personal computers" became a thing with the advent of cheap CPUs. Dumb Terminals/mainframes were largely discarded and everyone had their own computer on their desk with their won compute and storage. Then the Netware/Banyan era began and those desktop computers were networked to have some remote shared storage. (there's a slightly different branching with Sun/HPUX/DigitalUnix and Workstation grade hardware)
Then Citrix WinFrame and Sun Ray stateless thin clients showed up once again swinging the compute and storage almost entirely remotely to centralized heavy powered servers with (mostly) dumb terminals, but these were graphic interfaces like MS Windows or Xwindow.
Once again, powerful desktop CPUs showed up with the Pentium II etc compute was back under users desks.
Now phones and tablets with cloud has show up, and you're asking the question.
So what I think will swing primary compute and storage back to the user side (handheld now) is again, cheap compute and storage on the device. Right now so many services are cloud based because the massive compute and storage requirements only exist in volume in the cloud. However, bandwidth is still limited. Imagine when the next (next?) generation of mobile CPUs arrive, and with a tiny bit of power you could do today's bitcoin mining on your phone or process AI datasets with ease in the palm of your hand. And why would you send the entire dataset to the cloud when you can process it locally and then send the result?
So the pendulum keeps swinging; centralized and distributed, back and forth.
“Cloud” is just a 2010+ term for multihomed server. Before around 1995, almost all Internet-related storage was “cloud”, with people using terminals and terminal emulators connecting to the mainframe servers that hosted their storage.
And yet, even back then, people stored local data on floppy disks because sometimes you needed something when your online storage wasn’t available for one reason or another.
It's pretty funny how I've seen posts exactly like this one 10-15 years ago, and nothing has really changed that much from a consumer perspective.
It's just simply cheaper, more reliable, and more convenient to have local storage.
If you dug into history - with computers in the 70s-80s, we used to remotely dial into another computer. The terminal at your school (as home computers were pretty expensive) would dial into a stronger computer and you'd use up their resources.
Every few years, I see that mentality coming back. Cloud computing. Chromebooks. Remote desktops. Stadia and gaming on-demand.
Its fascinating.
Cloud storage will only last till they get a monopoly then when they start charging through the nose when they start the Enshittification phase . The scramble for local storage will begin but by that time they will outlaw it or some other bullshit
Theoretically you can host everything at home. You just need a connection that is fast enough.
Yeah the mass of goo will probably embrace it for the convenience, and the resistant few will be demonized as likely terrorists and go underground. I can see a Republican US Congress passing an Online Freedom Act that bans private storage over the amount needed to run Windows or MacOS and blaming viruses on Linux and Mexicans.
Local storage will always be needed in business environments, either for security reasons (sensitive files that can't go online), or technical (speed requirements or offline access).
Good point, I didn't even consider business.
It's why SD cards are still relevant. A professional photographer takes thousands of photos during a wedding and needs to process them in a computer. Cloud is not feasible or economical.
I would say it is unlikely - storage is so cheap that some form of local storage is likely to stay.
A terminal device still needs some form of storage to run the software to access the cloud. That might end up being some small storage on a chip but the difference is not between none and something, but some and more.
I also think there are enough people who want storage they own and control that it'll persist as a concept. Also having devices that work when networks are down is a benefit in itself - attempts to make devices dumb terminals get exposed as a productivity nightmare when networks do go out.
I think big business will certainly try hard to lock people in to their ecosystems. Remote storage, remote computing/graphics processing are all ways they will try. But conversely there are vibrant communities pushing independent & private alternatives that I don't see dying - whether thats Linux on PCs, or Graphene OS to take control of your android device etc.
where every computer is just a chromebook
It's horrible. We already have suffered a decade of Chromebooks and it's only contributing to e-waste because of how restrictive Google has made them and every manufacturer just falling over it.
We're already here with cloud storage and it's already a bad idea. Any seemingly good idea that comes across the minds of tech corporations, they will overwork themselves to make it the shittiest idea ever by their execution.
It’s already happening. Microsoft’s push to onedrive and m365 was to get everyone off of legacy apps.
Next will be ARM devices that have a multi-day battery because it’s all just cached apps accessing your cloud-saved data.
AFAIAC, all that that achieved was to push me off of those MS products.
I’m split. Outlook and other apps have turned into pigs but have very little competition to force innovation. Customers are just as complacent, and demand things not change at all.
Moving to PWA web apps has turned the industry around. MS is dumping all of the old code that causes so many issues.
I find other IT people expecting MS to not make even small changes, while also complaining about battery life and app reliability.
I’m looking forward to New Outlook. Supporting HTML and https is so much easier than map I and legacy client code with dirty plugins.
Likely, never due to the three storage backup rule: save on local device, save on external, and save one copy on cloud. So you don't lose your work or media.
Like others I don't see it happening but I could see a fast persistant storage merging ram and disk into one feature.
Very unlikely. You can already create swap files on your drives and that's painfully slow, because your drives are so much slower and further away compared to your ram. It's a very different means of storing and accessing data.
There have been a variety of endevours to make non volitile ram. Im not talking about with current technology. Im 100% certain storage will be merged in future.
I don't see that as likely until 10gbps connections are the norm
Network latency is like seek time on a HDD.
Unlikely, as cloud storage providers can't be trusted completely. They be like "but it's encrypted. trust me bro", but every time they get the chance, like when a weakness is detected in the cipher, they will peek or let some government peek. This is how magically your competitor ends up with your business secrets.
I still consider a microSD card a must for my portable devices so I can hoard media locally.
But I pay for a cloud backup of anything I produce.
"You would own nothing and you'd be happy"
This is a misinterpreted quote that led to a bunch of bullshit conspiracy theories by people who have not actually listened to the whole thing, such as what you're spewing here btw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset#Conspiracy_theories
I think we’re already there but not in the way OP describes. People haven’t had great experiences with Chrimebooks and storage is cheap
Think of your Google drive, OneDrive or Apple drive. The most common scenario is you use local storage for reliability and responsiveness, but it’s always aynching to the cloud. Many of your files may not even exist in local storage but it looks like it does
Or consider Apples approach to photo storage. You can choose to use iCloud for photo storage and it keeps only a thumbnail on local storage. Your basic browse and search operations are reliable and responsive, and but you download the full photo as you need it
For me, never.
There has been a ping pong between emphasis on the server or emphasis on the client since the beginning.
In the near future, there will likely be a trend to private / self-hosted clouds (instead of vendor clouds) for enterprise and enthusiasts that want data access in multiple locations. But at some point, all data could be local but synced to all your devices. That may be the ultimate client/server balance.
In some ways, it already has.
Lots of orgs that used to have file servers and data centres have been moving to things like OneDrive.
On-board storage space used to be a selling point for laptops, phones, and pre-built computers...but now some of them are coming bundled with a few months' subscription to cloud storage. It's been easy to find desktops with 0.5 or 1TB of storage space for years, yet the price of HDDs has been decreasing for years.
Plenty of people seem to use things like Google Drive as a way to move files or even to "save space on their devices" the way that we used to use thumbdrives or external drives (and yes, those are still viable methods of moving and backing up files, but it used to be the only way).
I think if your computer has only 0.5TB of storage, then the machine might as well be primarily a cloud storage-backed device. (Unless you've got your files elsewhere, etcetcetc). We'll always need local storage for things like the OS and for more easily running whatever apps or files that were just downloaded off the cloud...so I don't think it'll ever go to 0. But 0.5TB is pretty darn close these days! Lol
And if you think that you're not guilty of using cloud storage...tell me what percentage of your Steam library you have downloaded locally... Lol
(Steam isn't cloud storage, but the principle is similar -- "I don't need to store my files because they're available for me to download at any time from someone else's computer!")
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