Eventually we will migrate from CDs to spinning magnetic drives to solid state memory drives in our stereos. The transition to spinning magnetic drives is already somewhat under way. Yet, transition to solid state still present some challanges. Besides cost, current flash-based solid state drives have limitations in size (currently 128GB or so), rewrite cycles, and overall reliability. Newer technologies are being developed that will overcome these issues, and a significant transition to a type of solid state drive generically called Storage Class Memory (SCM) is expected to ramp up by 2015. What we do not know yet is the behavior of any of the dozen or so underlying technologies in regards to data retrieval clumping in the time domain, which we usually call jitter. There is an excellent trend discussion articles in the IBM journal or Research And Developement at:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/524/freitas.html
I suspect that regardless of considerations of jitter, reliability, rewrite cycles, and cost, we may see the start of a migration to SS drives in our hobby as soon as SS drives hit the 500Gb mark. After all, such devices would store approx 1500 CDs in flac. . . and some audiophile may decide to overlook some of the other initial limitations in favor of convenience.
