I saw a post recently about the incredible shrinking computer, where a software consultant had written down his predictions for the future. In this case, he writes about a computer shrinking smaller than today, essentially to one chip, with docking stations wherever you need them. We're already at the place where many of us have an extremely powerful computer in our pockets in the form of a mobile phone. I'm still amazed that I bought a phone recently with half a terabyte of storage.

A few years ago I gave a keynote where I looked at the changes in disk storage, starting with an IBM hard drive being loaded onto a plane. The capacity was 5MB. I remember working with KB floppy disks and MB hard drives, and lots of different connection technologies: IDE, ESDI, SCSI, and more. I've seen disks shrink from a 5 1/4" form factor to mere wafers with today's NVMe drives.

However, what might be even more interesting is that I don't even think about drives anymore as being a physical thing. Certainly, my mobile, my laptop, and my desktop have physical drives, but they're all connected together, essentially giving me invisible disks. I can take a picture on my phone and it shows up on my laptop or desktop in seconds. The disk might as well be invisible.

As I left full-time Operations work, we were  starting to see this in our servers, which were essentially invisible VMs stored in some location, on storage that we never laid eyes on. We never saw disks fail because the storage arrays had redundant disks. There were people replacing failed drives every week to ensure that service wasn't interrupted.

These days we rent storage in the cloud without ever working with the hardware. Most of us who specify the configuration in the cloud don't think about disks. We think about the total capacity and the IOPs that we need for our system. We care about the results, not the hardware.

Most of us. Some of us care and worry about it, but a lot of the people I know in data work, even as operational DBAs, don't worry about hardware. They need a high level of service and low latency to ensure clients can retrieve data. Even when requesting more hardware, most of us are asking for more capacity or throughput, not specific models of hardware.

I find myself rarely caring about disks anymore, though recently I was glad I had a flash drive in my bag. I needed to transfer a file to some air-gapped computers, and a quick copy on an old 2019 PASS Summit recording flash drive worked well. That drive was certainly visible, and full of memories.