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The Past and Future of the Hard Drive
Snags writes "Brian Hayes of American Scientist has written a nice little historical review of hard drive technology, from the first hard drive (nice pic) made by IBM in 1956 to what may be available in 10-15 years. He muses on how to fill up a 120 TB hard drive with text, photos, audio, and video (60,000 hours of DVD's). Kind of ironic that this came in my mailbox today considering IBM's announcement."
Love looking at the history of technology and all that, but what about looking into the future?
We've got holographic drives coming soon for your digital cameras. We've got more space than you know what to do with.
With IBM out of the picture, the microdrives of the future will have to come from somewhere else.
Where? Whom?
I remember going to the Trenton Computer Fair 8 years ago and finding a great bargain! a 5.25 full height drive that could hold 1gb!!! our bbs was gonna rock(loved them 0-day warez d00d).. we paid 20 dollars for it..which at the time was like a dream.. so it was probably hot... but it worked :)
The first hard drive on my very own computer was 40 megabytes. I managed to fit Wing Commander 2 on it twice, though why I did this escapes me...
I don't care how much space you give me.. its never enough. I'm running around 300 gigs right now and it mostly full. Why? because I do video work and motion graphics design, and I'm not very organized. I've got tons of source files from archive.org and I really don't want to go through the trouble of burning CD's or backing up to tape - I love to have it all accesible quickly via harddrive.
So of course I'm not going to fill all that space with typed notes, but even if I dont do as the article suggest and "document every moment of our lives and create a second-by-second digital diary". I still want that space for massive amounts of easily accesible data.. There's no reason I should ever have to delete anything ever again..
Uh. Except that I cant find anything I'm looking for anymore.. Can't this search function go faster?
air and light and time and space
120TB seems like an enormous capacity, but multi-terabyte storage mediums will be a neccessary in the future with REAL streaming media. What I'm worried about is the network connection - that has been my current bottleneck (even at 1.5Mbps). When we eventually combine HDTV PVR's, MP3 players, DVD archives, and pictures into a giant media database, the numbers don't look as staggering. But transferring that much data from one machine to another may prove to be the hardest part of all. 120Tbps network connection -now THAT'S impressive!
How will you pay for it all? At current prices, buying 120 million books or 40 million songs or 30,000 movies would put a strain on most family budgets
Don't we have Napster, Gnutella, KaZaa and the likes? We don't pay for that stuff, we **cough* borrow **cough** it!
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Anybody know how much that first hard drive's capacity was?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
not enough space for my porn divx and 500dpi porn images
I couldn't care less for the amount of disk space. I want faster disks with lower seek times...
I remember trying to cram as much as possible on my little 20mb hard drive -- I had DoubleSpace and then Stacker running to compress that thing to the utter maximum -- and I backed it up on floppies, too!
;-) collections, but for those of us who actually store mostly normal files, a lot of source code, etc, it'd be great!
What my real question is, with as much abstraction going on between the ide controller and the drive platters as there is now, why haven't we seen more in the way of harddrive firmware except for better bad-sector remapping and the like? What about hardware compression? A little flash memory or a dedicated on-disk area and a compress/expand chip and we could probably fit quite a bit more on existing physical head/platter technology with not much speed loss -- In fact, we might see some speed GAIN if we only have to pull 100 bytes off of the disk to return 1000 bytes of data, etc.. Of course, it wouldn't give you any more space for your DivX
I guess, unfortunately, it requires a bit (ok a lot) of work getting an OS to play nice with such a gimmik, but would installing a "driver" for your hard drive compression electronics really be all that much different than for your video card or drive controller itself? -- then of course there is the question of a filesystem that can handle the indeterminate capacity of this kind of system. IE you couldn't necessarily delete a 100M file and fit another 100M file in the same physical storage space...
ideas. something to muse over
He muses on how to fill up a 120 TB hard drive
Let's see - if the history of the internet serves as an apt model - 120TB drives probably won't meet consumer demands for long.
First harddrives will start to fill up with fully-imersive holo-pr0n, followed quickly, due to adaptive marketing trends by fully-imersive unsolicitted holo-spam.
There... that solves that ol' capacity problem quite nicely then.
:)
I remember in the days of 8-bit home computing, when the Amstrad CPC, Spectrum and Commode 64 were the kings, there would always be some little company who was *about* to release a harddisk for said machine. Usually no more than 80Mb, and usually costing around 500 quid. Never happened though, no doubt someone's got one out by now though?
Join the Free Software Foundation
Will probably be required by law to be installed in every harddrive, and the removal of said os will result in a prison term. This can happen. And I will not put it past MS to suck up 80TiB in a windows install.
Damn, just how much memory would it really require to do a simple Holodeck simulation?
Sure it can holds 60,000 hours of DVD. That's why when the time comes we'll come up will a more precise format. I don't believe we will had enoguht space until it can store a lifetime's worth of information in a format indistinguistable from reality to human senses. Until that point we will always be able to make it a little more lifelike, a little longer, there will always be somrething else to eat up the space, clockcycles and bandwidth. My 1 GB filled up just as fast as my 256 MB and I'm sure that my 60 GB will fill up as well. We still have a long way to go before we have "enough" space.
I stole this Sig
My dad would come home from work and tell me that the computer (probably something 8 bit) at work would fail several times a day. Mainly the hard drive (which was as huge as an ATX full tower case and only stored 10 mb) would stop accessing so they would have to reboot the computer. How did they do that? They gave a swift kick to the hard drive and the machine started right back up.
A well-known corollary of Parkinson's Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it.
I don't think this extends to distributed computing; I hardly think the collective drivespace of the WWW has been filled to the brim. Even a few percent free space per drive per server equates to huge amounts of unfilled sectors.
There are already a number of Terra satellites downlinking data at about 4GB/hr, circling from pole to pole in orbits lasting under 2hrs.
.
There are multitudes of airborne surveys churning out digital snapshots at 400MB a frame.
Mosaiced together at 1m resolution with R,G,B and mean height above sea level, how much storage will a single global snapshot of the earth take ?
Then consider for historical and environmental reasons, most urban/semi rural areas deserve a mosaiced snap at least once a year.
120 TB is just the start . .
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
15 years ago, I was speaking with a freind of my fathers about these new exotic 'hard drives' you could get. He was a big time computer guru, and I was a little kid.
I said to him that I thought a 10 megabyte hdd would be perfect, and that someday we would be able to buy one for less then $1,000. He scoffed.
I still remember this very clearly. "Why in heavens name would you ever need that much space in a hard drive"
I worked it out, and every concievable program I'd use, including saved files, all told would only need 2 megs. It was just impossible to think up enough applications at the time that a home PC really needed.
I'd love to run into him again and ask him if he remembers that conversation. In 10 years, 100 Terrabyte drives will seem 'quaint'.
The Internet is generally stupid
120 TB ought to be enough for anybody...
I do question some of his statements, however, particularly about human creativity:
Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: The products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can't keep up.
Or maybe it's only my imagination that can't keep up.
I'd say that the bolded part above is very likely. He states that he individually can't think of what to do with 120 TB, but collectively I'm confident we'll find a use for it. I've read through a dozen posts already where we've come up with some suggestions for use. Not to be critical or anything, but the surface has barely been scratched. It's not going to be all about data warehouses, streamable content, and how many dvd movies we can rip. Tell the whole world that 120 TB is available for storage, and a variety of uses will come up.
I'm pretty convinced that the actual consumer use of 120 TB will be for something that, if suggested now, we'll all laugh at and ask why the hell we'd want to pursue such an insane idea. For instance, the article mentioned mounting tiny cameras on eyeglasses to document one's whole life. The article also mentions home digital media hubs. Both are probably uses, but I actually think they are rather conservative ideas in the grand scheme of things. A successful idea now to think of an interesting and probably use of that much space in the future is more likely to come out of the mouth of some random guy while intermittently taking puffs out of a giant bong than any mature, prominent engineer.
Then again, some founders of successful companies were allegedly (I don't have any factual evidence) pretty fond of the herb.
"Thus the 120-terabyte disk will hold some 60,000 hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night without a break for popcorn, they will last somewhat less than seven years." Most people can't even last seven minutes with high-res pr0n playing, much less seven YEARS.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Not trying to troll or flame...but...
:/
That 120TB will be filled with heavily bloated DRM, compulsery spyware, and 1200x1024x32bit+ advertisement videos with embeded scripts that have almost virus like "features" (mark all pics and vids on HD with logos, insert advertisements in documents, make system not boot without reading advertisement, randomly play comercials, etc.) Then there is the 72GB+ windows install if you go that way...
Just an observation of the way things are going...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I used to think that my files would expand to fill all available space, but not anymore. Different tasks, different tools, and different personalities mean different thresholds, but I think everyone has a threshold above which they won't keep their disks full. For me, my disks stopped being full around 10 gigs. My wife's antique PC (running msdos 2.0 and used strictly as a text editor) had a 15 meg drive and never went above 10% full. Obviously your threshold is higher, but I'm sure it exists.
Even after they hit their thresholds, most people's use will grow over time, but slowly. We'll also start writing things in ways that don't try to conserve disk space. Compression will be used almost exclusively for data transmission. Future filesystems will probably keep every version of every file ever saved. (Hopefully with an option to delete the occasional residue of an indiscretion and accidental copy of /dev/hda). But even these things won't increase our use by us more than a factor of 10 or so. If we really do get 120TB drives, we won't talk about buying new ones very often.
A cynic's retort might be that installing the 2012 edition of Microsoft Windows will take care of the rest, but I don't believe it's true. "Software bloat" has reached impressive proportions, but it still lags far behind the recent growth rate in disk capacity.
I think they would have no problem occupying 20% of a 120 TB HDD, MS products have done that to my drives for years...
We now get /. effect * 4 as people try each alternative in turn, and they're all at the same location....
- First harddrives will start to fill up with fully-imersive holo-pr0n, followed quickly, due to adaptive marketing trends by fully-imersive unsolicitted holo-spam.
Of course, this will require the Macromedia Flesh plug-in...-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yes, it's a slow day at the office, how could you tell?
Did you even read the article?
When responding to a post that is among the first 5 posts of a story, the odds of the poster actually having read the story are slim to none. It is unnecessary and redundant to ask the question, because obviously in my fervor to grab the top post I didn't have time to actually read the article.
Thank you for the quote from the article, but I had already read it by the time you responded. To paraphrase the law of the land 'round these parts: Post first, read the article later.
A friend burns CDs like there's some sort of deadline. I've only just got myself a CD burner. Maybe if I downloaded MP3s through work I might run out of space a bit faster, but the 20gig I mentioned at the top of this comment is an IDE drive in a removable bay with a USB connection. If I need more storage I just buy another cheap drive and another tray.
At work, and I am fairly new here so I might get this wrong, we currently have about 6Gig of network storage for students which is more or less full, but our solution is simply to have Zip drives in every PC. Students have a quota and really their data is their own problem. Staff have 30Gig to play with and 5 is still free. And 9 of that is a backup of the Ghost images of the student labs that I made when I arrived.
Speaking of backups, it's been my experience that hard drive space is useless without the same amount of backup space available. DDS3 tapes only go up to something like 12/24 Gig if they haven't changed in a year or so, meaning that cheap and easy backup really ends at 20Gig. Personally, my 20Gig hard drive is more or less the backup, with data burnt to CD the same time it's moved from my portable's 4Gig to the 20Gig drive. But burning CDs isn't the best solution for stuff that changes frequently. (Although it seems to be the best option for Mac-oriented graphics designers who have to live in an otherwise PC-only corporate enviroment.)
My interest in retro gaming also probably helps keep my storage requirements low. Recently I burnt an 8Mbyte Dreamcast image that had an Atari 2600 emulator and over 100 (Public Domain) ROMs.
And I mean, who needs 120TB of random access storage? Seriously. I mean, sure it's nice to be able to skip instantly to a particular chapter of a movie, but how often do you do it, really? And the "Random" button on any given MP3 player is fun, but if you had to listen to the tracks in a particular order it wouldn't be the end of the world (imagine a DDS3 MP3 player - that's 12 days of music, solid, and it would probably be able to be smaller than the original Sony Walkman).
Wow, that was a long post.
It seems to me that, in order to get capacity increases beyond 120 Tb, they might just have to increase the physical size of the drive. After all, the form factor they have been working with for the past while has been these 3.5", half height things.
I have two boatanchors at home, 10 Gb each, which take up essentially two complete 5.25" bays. (Is this what a full height drive is?) What would happen if they applied the technology used in the smaller form factor to something this size? After all, they should be able to fit something like 12-20 platters inside one of these things, and those platters will be wider. Will cramming all those platters inside a larger box yield some savings in overhead, too?
One easy example is a complete set of examples of how to perform every possible task ... a set of "video man pages".
Nobody has yet imagined the best possible use of full motion video for OS and application use, but when they do, those disks won't seem so large.
Kenneth J. Hendrickson
Ought that not be "f`f"f`f""?
Or at least "fyfjfX"?
First off, virtual reality files, especially with photorealistic motion images, kineorealistic tactile sensation, and sound, (plus possibly smell).
:) you need to search your data, and if you want it to be at all intutive when you have over a million files you will need a program to organize it for you. plus aol-time warner sony will want to have your (hopefully) anonymous user data.
:).
Then comes your logs, because your going to log everything. with the encryption we will have, we can do it without fear. The only data we have to worry about is the data we have to compress for movement.
Program Files for the media. While right now we currently mostly use our data for media, I predict an explosion of data formats, which will require bulky reading/viewing/listening/VR software to operate.
Distributed computing data.
Your computer will be part of a p2p distributed computer project of some sort. Of course, since the project is either curing cancer, or earning you money, or evolving an ai, you don't mind.
Intelligent agents
IA (ai with a purpose
Device controllers for everything
everything will be controlled, even your toaster (toaster/oven/microwave/pressure cooker etc. of course). after all, who wouldn't want there auto drive to know what's in their appointment books
now, lets hope somebody will repost this with links and get modded up
Gryftir
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
I really love the articles that go deep into the future technology of hard drives, processors and so on. I enjoyed reading this one too and I agreed in many points on the futuristic stuff. However, he leaves many important points out! So what the heck do I mean? Read on..
Today's hard drives are just like the very first IBM disk: it consists of several platters which rotate continuously. If the techies can make platters which fill, say 30 TB each, then it means we do no longer need big hard drives. We won't need two, three, four or five platters inside. Portable computers will be smaller. Hard drives will not require the same amount of power. There will be less heat. They will be so much faster since the header will read a lot of information from an already fast-spinning disk with denser information on every square inch!
The article also states the fact that it will take too long to fill up 120 TB! When I read this, I was actually surprised to see a professional write something that stupid. I tend to see a repetitive pattern here. I remember Microsoft's own Bill Gates stating that no one will EVER need more than 1.5 MB (or so) of disk space. Today, Microsoft has an operating system that eats up, say 1-2 GB of disk space. I know the same thing will happen in the future. We might say that 120 TB is something we will never fill up, but I am absolutely positively sure that 1000 TB will be ridiculously low in my life-time as well (and I am 19, Swedish citizen, will live for a long time). Why'd I say this then? Think about it. Technology advances. The article has a word up on mp3-files and such stuff. Guess what: the mp3 format is available because most people got slow connections. In the future, when we sit on real fast ones, mp3 will not be the cool stuff. Maybe compressed 24-bit music (if compressed at all) will be the thing. Also, software developers will no longer need to feel that they must limit the size of a software on the hard disk. There's just so much that will be developed..
Another thing that came to my mind is: what happens in the next evolution of computers? Surely, we will see a real breakthrough soon in this industry in, say, graphics cards? Maybe pixel graphics will be dropped into really demanding vertex-like stuff that requires huge bandwidth and makes an image file of this format like many megabytes of worth! Why not?
And then to my last question: isn't "unlimited" hard drive space kind of a good thing? I'd rather buy a hard disk that I will never fill up. I don't want to have two hard disks in my computer that take up space, power and more. The article also says that it's tough organizing files at the level of terabytes (if anyone wants to install files of that worth). Heard of partitions? If I had 120 TB of hard drive space (pretending my current motherboard, OS etc would support it), I'd make many partitions and put names on them. One would be Windows (or Linux), one would be Temp, one would be Games, one would be.. Oh you know what I mean.
One last thing too. The hard disk development is actually controlling a lot of things. Software developers depend on hard disk space and so much more. If we all have at least 50 TB of hard disk space, don't you think the market will understand that and develop products that require a big load of this?
Summary summarum: the more, the better.
...you drop/kill one of these 120Tb drives?
Surely we want more effort into making them bulletproof. (+ it's only just one spindle).
-- Mod me down. I am not a karma tart. ffs,gag
It'd be nice to have an optical disk capacity comparable to hard drives again so that it is practical to do backups.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Solid state media will become dirt cheap in the near future, thin film memory cell's will see to that.
I'll admit though once they cover all that, the differences between SCSI/EIDE plus ATA will be a walk in the park.
Plus can IBM be sued for fraud or illegal trading because of their 120GXP drives being way off 200,000 hours MTBF specification? It must be written down in stone somewhere.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Don't forget about that amount of data you store because you -might- want access to some peice that it contains.
I have loads of data on my machine that I will probably never look at, but it's nice to know it's there.
If we really do get 120TB drives, we won't talk about buying new ones very often
I don't know, how much space does full motion holography take up? Seriously, we'll fill the space with something. Not everyone will fill a 120TB dive of course but there are those of us who will change our habits subconsciously to use more disk space. We just need a "killer" app.
The inventer of the web would have something to say one how to sort this much data.
m em ex.html
http://www.kerryr.net/pioneers/bush.htm
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mattkaz/history/
http://www.xpurple.com
"A cynic's retort might be that installing the 2012 edition of Microsoft Windows will take care of the rest, but I don't believe it's true."
So what? With terabytes of storage space, we'll *want* our operating systems to be huge. Don't you all think the Windows logo is boring? Fine, so let's display a 2048x1536 true color (a minimum, of course, like today's VGA) video in a lossless codec while booting up.
Sure, It's gonna take up a lot of space, but why should I care when my überbox will load it in a microsecond. Besides, what I really want is a holographic bootup sequence.
You all seem to agree that all these technologies are good uses of storage space, yet you don't like OS "bloat". Wouldn't you want your OS to use these same technologies to make itself look better too?
My Sig: SEGV
Think about it, you'd upload a file to Freenet and it would never disappear, every Freenet node that would have ever received the file could keep it cached for a long time.
With such capacity Freenet or distributed file systems would become the ultime backup tool, you'd never have to loose data again. All movies, music and books could be stored online and would be readily available from a nearby Freenet node.
But bigger HDDs will be needed so that even if most of the world is destroyed, the most important data online is preserved on single nodes.
A more optimist use for having all of the world's data on a single computer, is for sending the data along on space ships to far away galaxy's. Perhaps for humons on the ship to enjoy themselves during a trip that would take years (or generations), or for exchanging our culture with alian civilisations in outer galaxies.
You did not close windows down correctly...
Starting scandisk
estimated completion time 4 years 6 days.
and how long is speedisk going to take?
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Just think - every time you need to upgrade your PC or in the event of a system crash or hack.
I've currently got almost 0.5TB of data on various systems in my lab - some is backed up, some is burnt to CD, some I know I can redownload
Backup and data restore will become a major growth area for personal use during the coming years
Evil ZEN Scientist
Whenever I see an announcement of the newest harddisc with record breaking capacity I think "How do you backup that beast?".
Whenever harddisc manufactureres manage to double the number of bits that can be written on an inch of a track they get an four fold increase of capacity. But unless you increase the rotational speed of the plattern the time to read the whole content of the harddisc will double as well since the recording/writing speed is proportional to the linear density.
And the rotational speed only increases very slowly - we recently saw the small jump from 5400 to 7200 RPM for the "standard" consumer (IDE) harddisc, the first for several years (I personally stick with 5400 for the cheapo IDE drives for the next few years. Reliability, you know --- see IBM)).
Given that the lower limit for the time to make a full backup of harddiscs will increase roughly with the square root of the growths of their sizes over the time.
The other problem is that backup devices and media affordable for the home user can't keep pace with the harrdiscs, so in my eyes the traditional full backup get's more and more inpractical.
One of the most cost effective backup devices for a harddisc today is another harddisc, but it still needs hours to mirror the content of one disc to another. RAID or something that keeps two discs in sync automagically in the background is no solution - it saves you from data loss by harddisc failures (good if you use IBM GXPs and the like) but it won't help you if you or your software have/has destroyed some important files you have created over the past few weeks/months.
Well, I don't know what other people do, but I stopped doing full backups of the whole disc: Thank God a large amount of files on my harddiscs is not backup worthy since in case of loss I won't miss it (think swap space or contents of a web cache), can easily recreate it (like mp3s made from my own CDs or object files - if you track netbsd-current you keep them around to save some time on future inkremental builds and don't delete them after "make install") or get it back from another of my machines, CDROM or the net.
So I only have to backup a fraction of my discs and the good news is that in absolute numbers the amount of data to backup doesn't grow nearly as fast as harddisc capacities. In my case with compression it easily fits on an older harddisc for complete backups and for weekly incremental backups I can still use and old 1GB DAT (DDS) tape I've got for free. It's not the best solution since recovering from desaster needs some time and a lot of manual work but I can sleep better than those who don't do backups at all...
By the time 120TB hard drive popularised word documents will take 1GB each.
Later, in 1986, I bought an external 20 meg (HDSC20) for my Mac Plus for $1,200 and couldn't believe how cheap they had gotten. That same year I spent $700 for two one meg SIMMs for that computer.
I also remember around 1984 seeing my first b/w 2-bit porn pic on my Mac and being amazed at the quality!
The old days sucked, but it was also kinda nice to be around during that time. I can really appreciate how good I got it now. I just bought a 160 gig external firewire drive for $400 for example. Sweet...
No more backup worries either, I just buy firewire disks and tack on as needed, and rsync nightly...
I can just imagine the Canadian high school trying to flip enough burgers for that shiny new 5 petabyte mp3 player in 2010.
$100 down, $200,000 to go... just another 200 years and I'll have it!
Using a 16x9 foot screen, and IBM's 200ppi technology, at 24bpp and 30frams/sec, the video would take up aproximately 4e14 bytes. Oh, and I forgot the audio... of course that's uncompressed, but as much as I appreciate the quality of DVDs, I still loathe the compression artifacts.
How on earth are we going to back-up a drive full of that much information? I really doubt that we will have DVD capacities of greater then 30 gigs in the next 5 years. If I bought a second Tera-drive, what interface is out there that can copy that much info over to it in a timely manner?
Chika Chik-ah... do-e ow ow.
1920 x 1080 pixels
16 bits/pixel x RGB = 6 bytes
60 frames/second
Yields 746,496,000 bytes/second. (Or about 8 parallel gigabit ethernet cards)
Do this at full bore, and you get 160,751 seconds of video, less than 2 days worth!
Sure, I know you could compress the video, but I've seen 1080p up close and personal, I noticed the artifacts in the video on the monitor of the broadcast quality HDTV demo, and the sales guy finally confessed that they just had to compress it to make it feasable to record it on tape.
If I noticed it right off the bat, someone will pay to have this quality level.
So... when do we get the petabyte storage?
--Mike--
The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected. -- Will Rogers
I some letter to the editor of some computer magazine.
:-) and one CD-RW drive on my TiBook which I would use for backup except that the drivers from Retrospect don't seem to quite be working.
Now I own a 20MB & some 4.5, 6, 10, 15s, 19 & 30 GB drives, and you know what? I still can't backup my stuff worth crap.
I have one CR-RW drive for my Linux box (which IS backing up my domain,
Its never been IF the drives fail (I've hung lots of opened up drives on my cubicle wall,) but WHEN. And nobody has EVER addressed that issue properly.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
From the article: Suppose I could reach into the future and hand you a 120-terabyte drive right now. What would you put on it?
PORN!
I remember 17 years ago when a Seagate 20 MB hard drive went for US$500. Those were also the days when Maxtor introduced their 650 MB 5.25" full-height SCSI hard drive, which cost US$6,000 back then. (eek!)
Nowadays, that same US$500 buys you 320 gigabytes of storage on two 160 GB ATA-100 3.5" 1/3 height hard drives. (thud)
I'm surprised no one else here has ripped a DVD to their HD before. 2 gig per hour seems like a minimum to me.
And even if it isn't, by the time the 120 TB disk come out, you think we're still going to be using the worst DVD format? 720p is supposed to be coming out in a few years. I can't find the page with the details now, but 720p will require a new type of DVD disk, one that can store up to 24 GB.
That's right, your DVD collection is going to become outdated and worthless as companies republish into the new "Hi-def" DVD format.
Let us say the average DVD uses 70% of the space, 16.8 GB. That's about 7,100 hours. Compression might be less effective on these disks, since the entire point of having Hi-Definition DVDs is the extra detail.
And I've come up with another use for a 120 TB drive. The biggest, most kick-ass TIVO in the world. Imagine having any TV show that was shown in your lifetime available to view.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Regardless of size, the next hard drive I get will be "full" (at 90% of capacity) within the next 5 months.
I've seen this with every hard drive I've owned from the 500MB hard drive that came with my 486, to the 20GB hard drive I bought last December. And nothing stops it either. The best CD-RW did was slow it some. You start getting files that you just *can't* bear to take off the disk and the disk, so the disk fills up. So I'm quite sure that I'll find some way to fill a 120TB hard drive within 5 months.
That's always "2-5 years away"?
I'm a little surprised that the article didn't mention 3D data. To me, the next step in multimedia would be something like holographic video. By adding a 3rd dimension the amount of data per minute of video would be huge! Take it one step further and put together a "Holodeck" which would use 3D audio as well.
Geography data for next-gen flight simulators.
My biggest fear is the more data we keep putting on these drives the more we stand to lose when they crash. If only MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) ratings doubled every year. If you had your whole life's video diary on a huge petabyte drive and it crashed, it would be devestating. For that reason I think consumer grade data backup technologies are very underrated. My personal favorite right now is my Iomega Peerless Drive . 20 gigs of data on one cartridge!
An order of magnitude in space will likely mean the end (or least relegation to transmission) of compression for storing media. Why compress digital music to 2 chanel, mp3 when I can store, unencoded all the music everyone I know owns in 6 channel, 88kHz uncompressed, not tax my processor unencoding it and still use only a fraction of my disk.
It is also concevable that digital video will transition from the low res trash we have now to high res (1024x768 is a good average resolution from what I see around my department, ceartanly in 10 years people will be running more than this).
Uncompressed, 1024x768 video running at 24 frame a second (surely we can do better than that) uses 56mb/s that equates to about 5 hours per tera byte uncompressed. I think 120Tb will proove completely insufficient.
He basicly fails to take into acount the fact that software developers develop software to use the resourses available. It is currently unrealistic to store a large volume music so we have MP3 and OGG. Video runs along the same lines. More space = more freedom for developers and media.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
First off, The future 120TB drives will be cool. Second, does anybody read? IBM is NOT getting out of the HD business. They are moving most of their HD business into a joint venture with Hitachi. This new company will be 70% owned by Hitachi and 30% owned by IBM. (IBM is NOT selling 70% of its HD business). IBM is going to supply most of the technology (and employees. According to a CBS Marketwatch article) and Hitachi will manage most of the business. IBM will still be a leader in HD technology, they just don't have to take on as much burdon in the poor HD market right now.
Yes, I _WAS_ refering to Betacam and DV, and not even thinking about the HDTV versions. Heck, Umatic is probably as good as DVD (Just a different "Kind" of error)
As I said in another thread, I'm a geek for a network - who else has 4 million hours of video sitting on the shelves? (One of my projects tracks all those tapes)
And your right, film blows them ALL away
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I see a recurring theme that ... we will never fill up that much space . . . and other people being equally naive saying we will find a way to fill it up with video, music or images.
The good comments accept that we really have no idea what kind of things will be stored on a 120TB drive, but the idea that the only thing worth storing is digital versions of today's mass media is silly. With the advent of nanotechnology, there will be a need to store digital versions of material objects something that probably will take up some space, plus there is a lot of material objects out there. And what about personal brain backup(talk about your killer app), that's got to take up some storage and Advanced AI stuff will take up quite a bit as well. I mean if you can't download a monkey brain play with the genetics of it and run it in an emulated full virtual environment, what good are computers anyway.
If the average file size increases to something more like a half gig instead of a couple hundred k won't disk io be prohibitively slow? I mean copy an entire 80 GB hard drive right now takes forever....even if it is at 15k rpm. I wish that disk io could at least attempt to keep up with processor speeds and storage capacity
this sig is deprecated
People wil probably want *personal* storage of a thousnd hours of media. Beyond that you start forgeting it or never re-using it. We already have this capicty for books and music. A few terabytes gives a thousand hours of conventional TV. Some day they'll be forms of 3D TV, and that will really consume storage.
The article has a narrow view for future usage/demand. If there are unlimited storage space, we won't need compression formats at all. There is no need to bother to take the time to compress and lose quality, or waste the time trying to "losslessly" compress the content, when there is unlimited storage space. Remember when movies used less than 24fps? Just look at the old silent movies, for if they move unusually fast, then it's not above 24fps.
Furthermore, DVD quality is only limited to lossy 2D, 30fps, and 6 audio channels. 30fps is not that great for video. It would be fantastic, if there are common recording devices that can record high quality content at 1000fps. It would be fantastic to observe nature at 1000+fps. Or, imagine if pr0n was recorded at 1000+fps, and watch it at human perceptible speed (60fps;) however, if one needs to have slow motion, then one may not need to drop any frame.
Seriously, the possibilities for unlimited space do not apply to our current acceptance for quality. Anyone for lifelike 3D "video" with super high frames and unlimited audio channels? With unlimited storage space, the limitation to quality in the content requires the maximization of the limits in the recording device.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Just wanted to mention that the BaBar experiment
running at SLAC has reached a total of more than 500Tb of data.
I can't see spinning disk drives reachin the 120 tb capacity talked about in the article. Although I think the capacity will surely exist in 10 years, I'd place my money on either:
- some form of persistent RAM
- holographic storage media
Both have come a long way. The holographic option had a usable storage time of close to a year the last time I checked; not good enough yet for sale, but given that it started on the order of *hours* this is a damned impressive advance.
Plus, the holographic model being talked about now is a cube which you could *actually pop out of the machine*, put into your pocket, and take with you. Imagine going to a friend's house and being able to snap in your entire hard drive as easy as you do a floppy....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Sure, a terabyte on a single disk would be great, especially for large supercomputers like ASCII White or the new Linux supercomputer. But wouldn't this result in lowered overall memory throughput?
Let me explain. If I were to build a supercomputer with a 1TB storage array, I would probaby use 100 or so 10GB drives rather than ten 100 GB drives. Creating a RAID 0 array with 100 drives would probably be much faster than with 10 drives, even though the 100GB drives transfer data internally faster than thier 10GB counterparts (assuming the same RPM and number of platters). I realize the cost of supporting 100 disks as opposed to 10 is much greater, but you must make a tradeoff. Likewise, a single 1TB harddrive would not be as fast as ten 100GB drives.
Of course, if you are rich like IBM and most major universities (all they have to do is bump up tuition... again), you can just buy a bunch of the biggest drives available and make a super-fast, super-big array.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Ok, commercials aside...
//e to back up one disk to the other. The answer was 364 days plus a few hours. Barring power outages and such I thought it rather nice that I could use my computer one day out of every year. :-)
Years ago when IBM first announced Terabyte LP sized laser disks I computed how long it would take my Apple
Seriously though, 120TB isn't anything. A person who had this drive would store all manner of things. You wouldn't just put some books onto the disk drive - you'd put books, songs, videos, and lots and lots of games. This is not to mention if you are developing a game yourself you need LOTS of disk space for 3D models like trees, houses, people, monsters, and the like. That stuff chews up disk space faster than you know.
Truth to tell though, wouldn't it be something to have the Library of Congress digitized? Not just typed in but pictures of the actual pages so it looks like you really are reading the book? And what about having a voice-over so if you didn't want to read the book you could have the book read to you. Throw in a typed version for those books which are so fancily made they are almost impossible to read, translations into different languages, and maybe the movie based on each book and there you have it! 120TB all gobbled up by one book! (Especially if it was the Index to Insects -> 36 bound volumes each five inches thick! Microprint even! I never KNEW there were that many insects before!)
Not true. The SemiAutomaticGroundEnvironment (SAGE) System paid for the developmnet of harddrives. circa 1953. My Dad told me about them and the "gun" that generals used to point at blips on the radar screen. When the fiber optic light pen was activated a BOMARC missle was automatically launched to destroy the target. Computer games..........
The author set us up for this one. Every book read in a lifetime? Every word ever written? How about every memory, every thought unspoken, every dream. How about every meaningful configuration of every neuronal region in all parts of your brain this very moment? I don't know what anyone would do with that stuff, or how they would get it out of my head (thought they come close with some kinds of diagnostic scanning.) But if they could, and if they did (and if I let them) then you know what, 100 TB would maybe hold it. And if you do rapid multiple iterations to average the data over a few seconds, you get near a few petabytes I'll wager.
We spend all our time cramming cr*p into our heads, reading and watching, and the few gifted people spend some time getting cr*p out and on paper, audio tape and video. But imagine, what entertainment or educational value can be gained from sharing the thoughts of other's directly? I look at (digital) pictures of my children from years past and remember, and I have videos I can watch on TV and I can feel close to that time again, but what if I could actually see them again, in my brain, because I saved my retinal/visual cortex signals of their birthdays when they were young, including the smells and the emotions? And if I could do that, would I then allow them to download me?
Ethical issues aside, the central nervous system is the next great hack.
c@
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Data for the ultimate RPG. Large universe would be an understatement.
Or "Riven: the galactic edition".
Or "SimWorld: be a world leader".
perhaps i'm just low on creativity, but I can't imagine any way of capturing vide from real life with a system that isn't functionally equivalent to some finite number of video cameras.
A hologram isn't made by taking lots of photos from different angles. I don't know why you'd suggest it for motion holography. You need to look up how holograms are made.
You honestly can't see how a holodeck-like virtual recreation of a medieval battle (or whatever) would take up a petabyte? How about a hundred recreations?
y o u a r e a p i l e o f p o o
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aDoPT aN AsCIi tUrD tODaY!!!
I was an associate editor at Electronic Design magazine (then owned by Hayden Publishing) from 1977 to 1979, if memory serves me right. I suggested that they consider hiring a friend, one M.S., a fun-loving, witty and irreverent son of a minister.
When all the senior editorial staff was away on a trip, he wrote a headline about the likely forthcoming popularity of Winchester drives in personal computers, with full awareness of the PG implications, that said (approximately) "Hard drives set to penetrate PC market". When the bigwigs came back, they were not happy.
He didn't last, and my recommending him didn't help my future there.
n bodley [at} world [dot} std [dot} comm (do obvious fixes; also, I won't be able to reply to hundreds of messages! Will be busy this weekend.) A.k.a. Enby in Waltham, btw. Password is on a little slip of paper in an envelope, and it's just too much nuisance to dig out. I do have an account here. Lazy? Yes. Paranoid? Not really.
think about it: if all you had was a 14.4 modem and 1.4meg floppies, how fast could you really fill a 1 gig hard drive? Ok let's say you've got 56k and 650meg CDs, how long would it take to fill 100gigs?
Answer: a long freaking time.
Hard drives will only become full according to the transfer of data into them, with the exception being those very few people that actually make there own movies (no, i don't mean rip DVDs, i mean MAKE movies). If we didn't have 1.5mb cable modems and DVD drives we would never be able to fill up 50 gigs with just a 56k modem and having to buy CDs instead of getting burnt copies from friends.
The availability of cd-r drives and fast internet access has made it very easy to fill 100 gig drives, but if there are no advances in those two areas in the next, say 5 years, then the drives offered then will be far too large to be filled by a tiny 1.5mB/sec connection and little 650meg cds.
Maybe it's time to stop complaining and stop using M$ products.
That does give some hope that server technologies will keep trickling down and empowering we plebs!