Laptop hard drives are plagued with failures because the small spinning platters inside are very fragile and prone to damage. That’s why eventually all laptop hard drives (and eventually all desktops) will be replaced with Solid State Drive (SSD) hard drives.

Like a large Compact Flash card, the SSD hard drive isn’t prone to physical damage from falling or from magnetic fields. This means that your important data is much more likely to stay safe over time.

The future of laptop drive technology got a little bit closer with Toshiba’s Japanese announcement of a 250GB SSD hard drive. It will likely take a while for this to hit the United States, but this capacity is just about the same as non-SSD technology. At some point as demand increases, prices will drop and that will motivate more companies to include SSD drives, which will continue to drop prices—great for everyone.

In the meantime we'll all make due with non-SSD hard drives, while being very careful with our computers.