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Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte
Junky191 writes "I doubt anyone else noticed this- but today is the first day where mass storage is available for $1 per gigabyte (according to pricewatch,). There are several stores now selling 120GB models for $120 shipped. This is truly an amazing milestone for those of us who once spent $500 for the fantastically large 10MB models. I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB." With discounts, the price has been that low for a little while.
Bzzzt.
You're right that TB is TereByte. However, a TB is the next step up from GB, not the other way around.
GB=2^30 or 10^9 if you're a lying drive manufacturer
TB=2^40 or 10^12
PB=2^50 or 10^15
EB=2^60 or 10^18
the days of multi terrabyte storage systems for the home is a little further off. Unless someone comes out with more justification for that much space
When virtual reality (fully 3d, immersed environments) start to appear and be used in the home, there'll be a need for this kind of storage. Combined with processor advances to do the massive crunches needed for such an interface/game/devetool/whatever... the average home user will finally have the ability to experience it.
Given the advances in OS engineering, i'd put the initial uses of this (at home) in six years or less.
I don't think we'll be at $1/TB for a decade though (10 years ago we were at $1000/GB). And I agree, we don't need storage space to be *quite* that low for VR itself to take off.
IMHO.
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I have to say that single hdd for cheap is cool, but not as impressive in the price drop on arrays, etc. :) ]
I recently got a 10KRPM [10 drives] 40GB Rack mount ultra wide scsi 2 array with hot swap and a 32mb cache for $40. I thought this was an insane deal, this thing cost thousands new, but then I looked at ebay and it is more or less in the same price range as other similar systems - that, imho is the most impressive [except perhaps for the 0 frames dropped while recording video
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Look in the dollar bin, As-Is hard drives for a buck. Pulls from systems, not guaranteed. I snagged a handful of em on another order, and they worked fine for the purpose (booting a headless router setup). I got a 3.6 gigger that worked fine.
Of course, if you want a tested and error free pull, it's 20 bucks.
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FYI, the parent post is a quote taken from this web page: http://www.angelfire.com/pq/pcmuseum/storage.html
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The reason taht some OSes like the 1:1 relationship the artile talks about is that in some OSes the data in RAM gets written to the swap space durring "free" cycles. This means that if room is needed in RAM that page can be jettosoned without having to do a write back then. So if your OS does this, and your not currently using RAM much you *should* have an exact copy of most of the pages on the HDD. If you suddenly start doing a MASSIVE amount of calculations on something that is currently not in ram at all, you don't have to swap all those current pages out (they have alreadys been copied there) just dump them and load the new stuff. The less writing you have to do before you load the faster you can get the load done.