2.5″ disks to become standard in 2009?

The old, reliable 3.5" hard drive has been with us for years. Fifteen, to be exact. So when someone maintains that a new storage standard is going to take over inside of a year, you've got to at least hear him out. That's exactly what ZDnet's storage guru Robin Harris is predicting, and he's got a number of reasons to back him up: increasing storage capacity for 2.5" drives, dropping prices, increasing speeds and the advent of 2.5" drive arrays. "[B]y the end of 2009, most new storage arrays will be announcing with 2.5″ drives," Harris writes. "High-end workstations, like the next-gen Mac Pro, will be both smaller while containing more drive bays...The last 3.5″ disk will roll off the assembly line in 2014."

For more on Harris' prediction:
- see this ZDnet blog entry