"Nathan Young" wrote in message
news
So far, no HDD issues for me, even though I regularly fly at 10-11k
feet. I suspect the newer generations of hard drives are much less
susceptible to density altitude problems.

If 10K-11K is about as high as you ever get, I would not expect you to
notice any sigificant loss of lifetime for the hard drive. They are
typically rated to at least 10K feet, meaning they are specifically designed
to operate normally up to that altitude.

It's the people who fly much higher than that (without pressurization, of
course) who are likely to run into problems. I doubt it's a generational
thing. I think it's just that you're not doing anything that would cause
the drive to fail early.

That said, I do think that solid state, non-volatile storage, electronic
paper such as found in the eFlybook is the future. Personally, I'm hoping
for electronic paper configured as sheets with holes for a binder and some
sort of easy-to-use PC interface (maybe wireless, like Bluetooth, so you
don't even have to plug each page in individually), so that you can prepare
a binder of all the charts likely to be used (according to plan and backup
plan) and be assured they are imaged correctly before the flight starts.
The eFlybook is a good step forward, but it still has the problem that if it
fails in flight for some reason, you can't switch to the next page you need
for the flight.

Pete