This chapter refers to an article on magnetic storage in the December 2000 edition of IEEE Spectrum with the title “Magnetic Storage: The medium that wouldn’t die”. The title implies that magnetic storage should have become obsolete. Explain why many may have believed this, and why magnetic storage has continued to thrive.

What will be an ideal response?

In many ways, magnetic recording is intrinsically unpopular because it doesn’t fit into the semiconductor world. Ultimately, magnetic recording uses moving parts and that makes it both unreliable and sensitive to shock. People have always hoped that something better would turn up (in the 1970s it was magnetic bubble memory). But, as fast as new technologies emerge, the areal storage density on magnetic media rises so rapidly that it remains as popular as ever. However, the growth of the solid state disk, SSD, may yet have an impact on the long?term use of conventional magnetic recording technology.