That doesn't mean disk drives are going away anytime soon. Corporations will continue to expand disk drive farms for years to come just to keep up with the avalanche of data being created every day.

"Every time people create data and put it on the Internet, that means there's a tremendous increase in ... disk farms," Hoagland said. "You can't beat the capacity you can get on a magnetic disk drive, cost wise or volume wise. They're going to be buying disk drives hand over fist indefinitely, because they'll be needed more and more as people find they like using flash memory, but they can't afford to buy a terabyte of flash memory."

Of course, in 50 years, a terabyte of flash memory won't likely be so pricey, if past is prologue.