I was reading an article last night in the current ACM Queue, and the person being interviewed stated that in the next 5 years or so, hard drives will be in the 20 terabyte range.
I can't imagine ever needing that much space.
Do much Video editing? Could you imagine that you might want to?
How about a really powerful PVR that kept months worth of your favorite shows?
What if you wanted to run security cameras around your house and store the video on your computer for quick access?
How about keeping a library of all the copyright expired works that have been digitized on-line and local. Why wouldn't you want such a thing if it were available and cheap?
Even if you want NONE of the above, how about a filesystem that automatically maintains dozens or even hundreds of copies of everything that you do store now to minimize seek time and increase access time accordingly? Writing something new or updating something would invalidate all the copies and it would remake the copies when you were away from the machine. Do you like the idea of faster computing?
Re:Really?
chaoticset on 2003-06-21T02:21:02
Hum...I don't think he's saying "pah, it's pointlessly large" as much as expressing amazement at what size of drives we're rapidly approaching.Maybe I'm wrong. jdavidboyd? Clarification?
I remember this very clearly: when I was a Unix system admin in 1986, we got a new DEC VAX 8500 system with a tower of four RA81 drives. I formatted two of them as single C partitions, and I recall saying to a co-worker, "Do you realize these drives are a gigabyte each?"
Now I think machines with a gigabyte of RAM are too small. Won't be long before we're scoffing at those puny single-terabyte drives.
Let's see. Your average two hour movie, or in my case MST3K episode, goes at ~700megs a pop. That's 1400 movies per terrabyte. And that's not even at a really high quality. With that extra space, plus DVD-Rs getting cheaper, the average movie rip size will probably jump to 2-4gigs each (ie. what a DVD-R can hold as opposed to what a CD-R can hold). Now you're down to about 350 per terrabyte. I can fill that. Don't forget games, currently eating 500-1000megs each currently limited to the size of a single CD-ROM. Remember the days of a game coming on 10 floppies? If history repeats itself, we'll start seeing more and more multi-CD games taking more and more HD space to install. And then there's video editing. Look at the OSCON movie. The original 7 minute uncompressed video: 1.6 gigs.
About the only thing which isn't getting much larger is music. We're already storing music at nearly its max quality at about 30-50 megs an album. That's a lot of Engelbert Humperdinck in one terrabyte.
The RIAA is doomed.
