A friend of mine in the disc drive insustry laments the fact that the One Laptop Per Child XO uses flash memory rather than a hard disc for persistent storage. Yet even without disc drives in the laptops themselves, these machines will drive demand for hard discs. While mostly self-contained, the XO is designed to work with school servers of various sizes that will have disc drives. For disc drives to be attractive for an XO successor, they would need to be very small, very rugged, and very cheap. That's a tall order, but I think we can get there.