If hard drive betters optical digital retrieval

Wow very interesting about Olive. I know that PS Audio has something like this in the works. I think this is the future of digital playback.

HELLO, hard drives as we know them today will be extinct just as all other computer hardware has become. The future of hard drives is solid state

Old news, the real deal is to slot a 64 gig (or bigger !) flash drive (i.e: no moving parts) into your PC of choice with a suberb usb dac, ala one of Gordon Rankins @ :

http://www.usbdacs.com/

or from the likes of

UltraFi- iRoc, Benchmark- DAC1 Pre, PS Audio's LinkDac, & VAC's new USB Dac offering...

A flash drive equipped PC connected to one of the above is currently the "killer app" of audio media hubs in my opinion, and in many instances can totally "dust" a megabuck silver disk based front end...!

With an Apple laptop or MacMini and iPhone or iPod Touch for example, you can have full wireless remote control of your entire library with a comprehensive graphical interface which is light years ahead of any of the current competition in this rapidly evolving sector..and being software based can be updated virtually cost free and easily without alteration to your lossless ripped source library.

All the above can still cost less than a premium hardware device, most of which thus far, poorly attempt to combine half the above features in a proprietary manner...just my 50 cents worth !

Actually some people did have things just like this at CES, including I thing Boulder and someone in the middle level too.

Meridian has always used DVD-ROM drives to allow high speed scans to counteract miss-reads.

Laptop Flash Drives Hit by High Failure Rates

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143558-c,memory/article.html

"Don't be the first onto the ice, and of course, not the last off."

Soon enough this will be forgotten as reliability betters and size increases.