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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."
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!
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
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
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.