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

More space..

[PopeAlien]

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?

Re:More space..

[Nogami_Saeko]

Yup, join the party - 400 gigs here and I still need more. DVD authoring, HD Film work, graphics post, you name it.

Thankfully though, it's on my own machine at home due to the falling price of technology, both hardware and software. I can work at home with the music cranked up, without people bugging me, and get stuff finished faster than in an office.

Then just pop in the 80 or 160gb removable IDE drive to drop the files on and courier them back to the client or the post-house. Great stuff, this cheap storage.

But I could still easily use 1tb or more of space to allow me to work on larger sequences, store more video, etc.

One of the great uses of this amount of space that the author suggests is something like completely capturing an entire digital sat/cable stream.

No more "using the VCR" to tape the show you're going to miss, but storing an entire weeks' worth of programming or more. Don't have to worry about missing something because you've got the entire broadcast from every channel archived and ready to watch.

That would be cool. A "central multimedia server" [like central heating?] that would store every TV program received, every radio station programmed, every CD I buy [ya, really!], every DVD I own, etc. Great use for nearly unlimited storage.

I'm sure that the old folks at the MPAA/RIAA are going into panic-mode even THINKING about that sort of idea, but it's the future folks, deal with it.

120TB isn't that much...

[wumarkus420]

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!

120 TB enough?

[quantaman]

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.

Reminds me of a conversation I had

[interstellar_donkey]

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'.

Re:Reminds me of a conversation I had

[anthropomorphized]

I still remember this very clearly. "Why in heavens name would you ever need that much space in a hard drive"

Which leads me to my theory: When you think the processor is faster than anyone will ever need, when you think that you RAM is more than enough to do anything you will ever want to do, or when you think the current state of storage capacity is larger than anyone will ever need.... get out of the field. You no longer get what it is all about. You have lost the vision.

human imagination

[sahala]

First off, great article. Well written and even understandable for someone non-technical (we should all take note).

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.

you'd keep 7 years of video?

[upper]

The article's hypothetical drive is 120TB -- 400 times as much space as you complain about filling up. I know video editing takes a lot of space, but would you keep 7 years of video? A movie a day for your whole life? Or 30,000 copies of the one you're working on? I doubt it.

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.

speed

[winse]

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