Has anyone considered using a solid state electronic head instead of the current mechanical one for hard disks ? I am considering a slab of silicon or other material with thousands if not millions of heads which can be digitally selected and data read from the underlying disk without any need for mechanical movement ?

solid state disk is nothing new ... it already exists in a wide variety of applications i_XpUser

Current price for 8Gb Solid State drive $369 Can pick up an 80gb IDE drive for about $40. Cannot think of a single home use situation that would justify SSD I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

"I am considering a slab of silicon or other material" That's nice - everyone needs a hobby - although a slab of silicon isn't all that useful in and of itself. Ideas are great, but a little research and, oh, I don't know... education might make that road a little smoother I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter