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."

Comments

60,000 hours of DVD? Not likely.

[ErikZ]

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That's right, your DVD collection is going to become outdated and worthless as companies republish into the new "Hi-def" DVD format.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.