The impending demise of the traditional rotational hard disk drive (HDD) probably won't be on your mind when you read about the announcement this week by Hitachi about its new 2TB desktop hard disk drive. And why should it be? Built on a number of robust and well-understood technologies, having a 2TB hard disk in your workstation is nothing to scoff at.

On the other hand, you only have to look a little further at OCZ's practically parallel unveiling of a 1TB SSD, and you will catch a glimpse of the tremendous strides that solid state disks (SSD) have made in the last couple of years.

Now, I don't have the technical specification for Hitachi's new HDD, but I'm willing to guess that even an "average" SSD would have left it in the dust. And OCZ's latest and greatest will have up to four built-in controllers capable of performing RAID 0 internally to speed things up even more.

Of course, the price of SSDs is still a lot higher than that of a comparable HDD. And the HDD's superior price per megabytes will likely remain so for some time to come yet. I would certainly get a HDD as a secondary hard disk or for a media server. But if I'm getting a new laptop or desktop, you can count on me going for an SSD as the primary drive.

HDD or SSD? The answer is obvious to me. - Paul Mah