
Ask HN: Will We Start Using PC's Without HD/SSD Storage? - Roybot
With all these cloud storage providers like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. Will we at some point start buying personal computers without storage?
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HelloFellowDevs
I believe at some point people would, I don't know if I would. With the usage
of Chromebook's and lite laptops that depend on the cloud for most of the work
it definitely looks like its trending there. Maybe if they made a 'dev' lite
laptop I'd be sort of interested.

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Roybot
Thanks for the thoughts. I didn't know Chromebooks didn't ship with a hard
drive.

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Piskvorrr
They do have some storage, sure, but it's there mostly to bootstrap for online
operation. I have been running diskless nodes for some time (no storage media
at all, netboot all the way), and IMHO we're getting to the point where it
could be practical to do that even with a Chromebook.

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Roybot
Got it. Yeah the idea of a no local storage world sounds interesting. Haven't
taken the time to sit down to think about what that implies, like what can we
build in that world that couldn't have existed otherwise.

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simonblack
Yes. We'll try that for a while.

Like centralised computing-power and peripheral displays, centralised storage
is highly dependent on the network always being up. Without the network
there's no storage, so no data, no apps, no work.

Whether the networks can be dependable enough is the critical factor. I think
that it won't be dependable enough.

When companies lose millions due to an unexpected network outage, they will
soon come back to insisting on local storage.

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Artemix
As a person living in a place with little to no internet, I can assess that I
don't see any reason to depend on central societies and fast internet speed to
use my computer as normal.

Here, we usually try to own as much as we can, and only rely on services when
there's no other accessible alternative.

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Roybot
I can definitely see where places with poor internet connection can make
something like this just an enormous inconvenience.

