Hard drives

Driven by the insatiable demand for more usable navigation information and entertainment content automotive disk drives will become commonplace only after cost and other issues are overcome, experts predict.

Automotive engineers trying to deliver more information and entertainment content are beginning to adopt hard disk drives. While hard drives offer several gigabytes of storage and fast accessing times that designers want, there are still some concerns about durability and pricing.

Hard drives are fast data storage devices that can hold thousands of MP3 music files as well as lots of navigation information. Reliability issues of the past have largely been resolved as more and more mobile drives ship in notebook computers. These improvements are expected to continue, prompting many to predict that hard drives will one day be as common in cars as microprocessors.