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

120TB?! It's not enough already

[Nathdot]

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.

:)

120 TB == one snapshot

[Gis_Sat_Hack]

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 . . .

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'.

autopr0n

[Renraku]

"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.

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.

Re:What will be on it in 10 -15 years (I hope)

[glwtta]

First off, virtual reality files, especially with photorealistic motion images, kineorealistic tactile sensation, and sound, (plus possibly smell).

Mmmm.... future pr0n.

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.