Blindspot: OMG – how much time has humanity wasted with spinning hard drives?

I got my first computer with a solid-state drive (SSD) last year. For me, the biggest thing I noticed was the fast boot time.

My daughter got a computer with an SSD last Christmas. The biggest thing for her was the battery life.

Fast boot and longer battery life were not enough to make me think SSDs were anything special.

Then I took my wife’s 2009 laptop and swapped out the hard drive for an SSD. Not only did she see faster boot times, but everything else was incredibly zippy compared to the slow down the old laptop was experiencing.

Which got me thinking: How much time has humanity wasted waiting for hard drives to deliver data? These hard drives with spinning platters have made us wait for machines to boot, given us the spinning balls of Waiting for Godot, and our reading and writing to them has moseyed for decades as the computers they were in far outstripped their speed.

What would happen if all the computers in the world switched to SSDs?

Oh, my.