I’ve been in the PC world for a long time and I am still shocked at the footdragging by storage giants on many fronts and a lack of analysis into what consumers need from their storage devices.

For instance:

1. Make copying disk to disk stupid easy: less reliance on 3rd party apps. Save people time and headaches. Consumers don’t want to know the technical details or fiddle around with partitions and know what a MBR (master boot record) or even what a partition is.

2. Ease plugging in of hard drives into the front of the case, and ‘lobbying’ for PC case redesign. Right now hard drives COULD be installed inside a computer without opening up the case if hard drive cages were standardized across the case industry and one could simply slide a door on the front of the case and slide a hard disk in. It would take away a lot of the ‘geek’ factor and turn it into a more consumer friendly item.

3. Many devices still don’t make it easy to mirror or copy drives. Why does one, for instance, need Norton Ghost or Partition Magic when the storage industry could handle or offload many of these tasks from the user completely without the need for 3rd party vendors, except for exceptional cases? One could easily see the storage industry build such functionality into drivers or software and use their clout to get it included in all major versions of windows.

It’s 2008 and I still have to worry about either rebooting to DOS and using Ghost to make mirror images of my hard drive, or using really buggy versions of Ghost 12 or 14 for Windows XP/Vista. There is a huge market for offloading complexity to the those that know it best, and who better then the storage industry to know about how customers use their products? It’s about time the CEO of many major hard disk and storage companies learned something.