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 . . .

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.

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.