Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Hard Drives: Ballistic Magnetoresist
Hirsto writes "Found this interesting story about breakthrough research on next generation drives. Here is a link to the NSF press release on this technology which supposedly enables storage densities of greater than 1 terabit per square inch. Devices might be on the market in 7 years, give or take."
Did anyone else find the quoted statistics confusing?
Each of the filaments can read infinitesimal magnetic fields and at room temperature can detect a 100,000 percent change in voltage. Shouldn't that be a 1/100,000 percent change?
Yes, they might be on the market in seven years. So might cold fusion and room-temperature superconductors.
And cloaking devices.
And an honest politician...
Game dev and music blog
Terabiit BM announced their latest offering in the 'Eye of the Needle' premium hard drive series, the LOC Plus, which uses the planetary orbit measurement of data storage and promises to hold in excess of 10X12> LOCs. The new unit goes on sale just in time for this season's channel fest on DynSat XIV.
1x10^15x5.25= a lot of porn in the space of a single drive bay!!!
As proved by IBM's recent move to dump its storage division, hard drives can't compete with other forms of storage. DRAM memories have gone down in price dramatically, to the point that they are on par with what magnetic storage prices were eight years ago. All this while maintaining their tremendous speed advantage. How far off can battery backed RAM storage systems be?
The truth is, though, that neither system is much faster than it was eight years ago. While CPU speeds have increased tremendously (ten times or so), RAM and hard disk storage speeds have increased to about twice what they were. The forms of mass storage that have increased much more are getting more compelling. Optical storage has increased in speed dramatically, while falling in price even more dramatically. New higher density DVD replacements can only continue this trend.
I expect that the combination of cheap super high performance mass storage (battery backed DRAM) and high speed mass optical storage (DVD replacements) will doom hard disks to the history cabinet of history. I know that I will be cheering when they are replaced by high speed optical media. After all, what good is your data if you can't see it?
The wheel comes to mind...
isn't this yet another 'already been posted' news story?
In 7 years, I'll have a CPU built into my chest with data flowing through my veins, at an amazing storage capacity of 1 Terabyte per blood cell!
Sounds really dangerous! I'm calling Ashcroft now!
Really, for most non-warez (and related) people, a 20GB harddrive would be more than enough. Of course I'm aware of servers, datacenters, people working in film production, the music industry, et al, but these are hardly the majority of harddrive buyers.
What I'd like to see is not "Terabit blahblah" but "secure, reliable blahblah".
I don't want one of my harddrives to die every few months, despite quite light use.
I don't want to have to back everything up in three places, out of fear for losing all my important work.
I don't want my drives to go *whiiiiiiine KACHLUNK* for no damn reason at all. This actually happened yesterday with a drive only half a year old. Back in the 80s, the drives in my computers never died, and I can still boot up that ol' Macintosh SE, and the harddrive works. That's more than I can say about any of my computers from the late 90's.
I want my harddrives to be as reliable as my RAM.
At least we got a new link.
Chopra said the ballistic electrons lead to clearer binary signals -- at least in part. However, "we don't fully understand how the signal is enhanced to such very large degrees," he said. "The existing theories don't yet explain it. There are some things here no one quite understands. That means there's a lot of science to be discovered yet."
Look like the Continuum are winding the IBM engineers up this week.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Their 'science' bits don't make sense whatsoever. What's that junk about sensors swinging between 0.8 and 1.2 or -1000 and 1000 supposed to mean?
As far as I can tell all they're trying to say is it's a thousand times more sensitive than current sensors. Maybe.
I had a 8GB Quantum Fireball and was very hapy with it for like 6 years. Then I bought a new PC with 40GB Western Digital HDD. TWO DAYS LATER it died! KABOOM.
I was lucky it was so soon! I went back to the store where they changed it and DEMANDED a quantum this time (called MATROX now).
I bet my horse you have a Western Digital HDD.
Yes?
all that stuff I see on Alias is real then! Next thing ya know that stuff on Star Trek is real too and they just been keeping it from us. What I really want is for all that Batman stuff to be real - I could really use a big car like batman to get through all this snow around my house.
Do they just try making bits smaller and smaller, and out of increasingly diverse kinds of materials until they find something that works or what? Serious question..
Enough "hard drive of tomorrow" articles, already.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Haterade
I don't know if I can wait that long. I was hoping it would be more like 5-10 years.
Shouldn't we be moving over to some time of solid state storage devices soon? It seems like it would be a more reliable solution than all the moving parts in hard drives. Does anyone have some links on this?
Its obvious Bill Gates made all of his money off of the Vegas version of Windows Solitaire.
How many Libraries of congerss (LOC) can I fit onto a drive the size of a credit card?
Duke Nukem 4ever?
No, wait....
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
What's really juicy to me is the applications for nanotech, as mentioned in the article. I wonder if this kind of technology could be used to tranfer data to nanites. Now that *would* be a small hard drive.
Gryftir
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
That's forever!
7 years is 49 years in computer years. Seven years ago, I was running Windows 3.1 on a 486 in my office. I'll either be pushing up the daisies or in a zoo with the placard "Last Remaining COBOL Programmer" over my cage.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
um, time was, 3.4 gigs were enough Pent II systems
time was, 200 Megabytes was plenty Pent/Pent PRo
time was, 20 megaybytes (pc xt) was plenty
time was, a 300k floppy was plenty apple
Wait for it, and the usefulness of a terabyte to a home user will be achieved in our lifetimes
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
No pr0n jokes, please... how big does a hard drive need to be? I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB. Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer? Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards? Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot? How do you back up such huge systems? Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public.
Design for Use, not Construction!
My present system has more RAM than the disk space on my system a decade ago - a 20MB ST506 winchester. But guess what - I still retain about 5MB of data from that hard disk (mostly docs, personal accounts etc). Disk drives serve a functional need, and will continue to exist - I dare say, forever.
Storing data in RAM may be faster, RAM prices may get cheaper, but DRAM will never compete. Actually hard disks give better storage life and value than tapes and tape drives for long-term archival.
Thus disks can acts as:
RAM - While 'swapping'
Disks - For storage
Tapes - For archival.
Hard to see them fading away anytime soon.
Most moderators are Morons. Sensible Moderators are Oxymorons.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Just as I can install Ninnle Linux on it...but Ninnle being Ninnle, it installs on just about anything, from the lowest 386 to the latest P4!
How do you read/detect infinitesimal magnetic fields, anyway? I assume they just mean "really small," but I don't know what "really small" is in relation to data storage technology. I mean, to me, 1 Gauss is small.
Hard Drives: Ballistic
whenever I go out to buy new hardware, my wife goes ballistic. Does this count too?
> I want my harddrives to be as reliable as my RAM.
You mean you want them to loose all the data every time you reboot?
...so it will take seven years until they receive #1 at f'd company.com.. and only 1 or 2 year from now until someone else produces harddrives that outperform their 7 year shit w/o any problems in every detail...
The parent post ranks up there with "640K of memory should be more than enough for anyone".
Saying 20GB should be enough for most people lacks a certain amount of perspective that you only get with a lot of time in this industry. (I am guessing that you are less than 25 yrs. old, fairly new to the computer industry, or you really haven't given that comment much though - in haste to make a different point that reliability is more critical than size....tell my girlfriend that.)
When 40MB drives came out, similar comments were made. When miniscule hard drives came out on the PC AT, similar comments were made.
The reality is that it's difficult to foresee what the future will bring as far as storage needs, but the cool thing about this industry is that storage requirements expand to meet or exceed capacity.
Here's a case in point.... Do you think that the average person's brain holds less than 20GB of data? I bet it's FAR more. My feeling is that a PC designed to assist the human can grow to demand similar amounts of storage to the human brain - why not?
So my non-revolutionary prediction is that average software for average people will continue to demand more and more storage for the next century, and that 10 years from now, YOU will shutter at the fact that you ONLY have 20GB on that old circa-2003 PC, or will have long since abandon it for a much larger storage medium.
Please come back to slash-dot in 10 years and repeat your comment that 20GB is plenty for the average user.
Not as good as solid state memory? questions of reliability? don't slashdotters know that Magic Pixie Dust has solved reliability problems? You obviously have not been using enough quarters in your Future of Business Glasses!
Big deal. I detected a similar change in voltage in my body, last time I was messing with the wiring in my flat.
-- yes, i know it hurz...
I agree.. and this is toally on topic ... who modded this post down?
why do people even mod down anyway.. a post like this isn't going to get modded up.. it will remain at 0.. do you need to mod it down lower for some reason? who gives a fuck..
instead of concentrating on modding lower.. why not use your points on modding up truly worthwhile comments -- like mine.
free james brown
You've just had bad luck, or I've had good: I had an IBM 10-giger on my Dell laptop that was in 24/7 extremely heavy use for well over a year until it died. The reason was a cup of juice I spilled on it. What a crappy HD :P Dell replaced it for free, no questions asked (warranty was past its due date). The replacement worked fine in similar use for two years until I sold the laptop.
Now I've had two desktop HDs (Maxtor 4D060H3 and 4K040H2) which have been in even heavier use for over a year, no glitches whatsoever.
I can vouch that my HDDs go through constant stress-testing: 24 hours on, 7 days a week, FTP-transfers, eMule (hashing large files is a killer), seti@home/folding@home, all running at the same time.
Can you imagine the tape backups for this? We'd have tapes the size of suitcases, and a backup run taking days instead of hours. Or maybe in the dim and distant future we'll all have raided systems.
you want them to loose all the data
That made no sense.
Some people make no sense.
I'd like to know what you base your assumptions on. I do not have one byte of warez or pirated anything on my main workstation at home, and I'm using 54 out of 60 gig. Add up the OS, applications/games, MP3's (ripped from CD's that I bought legally), personal data, etc. etc.
I just love when people make pronouncements like that here, like they have actually done a survey and statistical analysis.
Twenty gigabytes is enough for a casual PC user, barely. I'd say 60-100 is a better bet for today's 'power user', at a minimum.
Sounds to me like this "ballistic electron" effect is a direct consequence of narrower signal paths, probably some ugly quantum theory behind it. Yes it's the kind of effect they probably simply ran into.
It's kinda the same kind of thing that happened when they had accelerated an electron to 1/10th lightspeed, and wanted to make it go ten times as fast. The classic theory used to say that would require 10^2 = 100 times the energy.
I imagine we'll see a lot more of these quantum problems show up as we develop nanotechnology...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The data is tight... then when you reboot, it loosens.
I think he meant LOSE all the data.
Tapes - Temporary backup.
Optical - Permanent backup.
Tapes, or any magnetic media for that matter, are not suitable for long term storage. Use CDs or DVDs for long term storage.
Hard drive space requirements are going to vary from user to user, and I think it's a safe assumption that most hard drives are far larger than a typical user needs, but that's not the point.
Hard drives don't appear to have the life that they used to. On top of that, most major hard drive manufacturers cut their warranties from three to one year.
That sucks. Maybe hard drives are big enough, just for now. Maybe they need to start being constructed better again.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
It is a dupe :-)
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
C am ercbi orm.ydcbi axrgy cyw xgy ,d.b C yfl. cb ekrpatw br rb. gbe.poyabeo a ,rpe C-m oafcbi!
D.nl m.v
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
If you're connected to a fat pipe, people tend to stop worrying so much about hoarding stuff, and start using it instead. I know some people sitting on a 100mb line, and they're mostly interested in streaming stuff. E.g. stream music from their computer to the computer at the party they're at, for instance. Or to download at whereever they can plug in with their portable player.
The reasoning is this - if you can stream it faster than you can use it, why care about downloading it? E.g. they look at other peoples movies over the network - directly from that machine. Unlike now, where everybody with a slower line (even normal broadband is "slow" for what I'm talking about) "have to" have their own copy. Imagine if you and your friends simply mutually mapped up folders, would easily cut hard disk use by far.
This just works for things that are naturally streamable, like music and movies. As for things where you need the full thing at once, like games, I remember "The 7th Guest" that came on 2 CDs back in... ancient history. Most games are still on 3 CDs or less. So relative to hard disks, they've become smaller and smaller...
So yes, I also think that the need for enormous hard disks might not be that incredibly big. But not because they don't need it - people will simply have access to other peoples files as excellent substitutes.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I can go out to the local mega-buy and, while being fed bullshit by undertrained sales slugs, pick up 200GB 3.5" form factor hard drives till I get bored. Now, assuming they are about 3.5*5*.5inches, you have just over 10 cubic inches. Find me ANY dram based storage that you can BUY NOW that has anything near the density. I can get, not locally though, 1 GB dimms, and have heard of 4GB, but have not actually held one in my hand, so they don't exist in my reality. Even if they do, try to fit 50 of them in that space and not have them melt.
Now, I am purposely leaving cost and speed out of this. While they are much faster, a quick check of pricewatch shows a 1G PC2100 DIMM is only $4 more than a 200GB HD. 50 DIMMs is slightly more than 1 200GB HD. Pretty competitive if I do say so myself, even ignoring the cost of a platform that could handle that much memory.
Lastly, if you look at non-volatile memory, like flash, again ignoring the problems like finite writes, it is in the same price ballpark, though MUCH slower in speed than DDR. Pick your poison, but I will take HDs for 2% the cost, and about a 75% speed hit thank you.
-Charlie
Lets see, I currently have 1.4TB of storage and always looking to add more.
On that storage I have my DVD electronic jukebox, (not-pirated), my mp3's, images of my various computers builds (past, present, and future) Archives of all my computer CD's, over 20,000 5mp digital images, a ton of food recipes, complete with digital images, 6 years of archived non-spam email, and tons of other stuff.
You know what I definitely need more space, for my Digital video's, my Oracle instances, More digital images, my archive of my older Atari, amiga, apple software, my automotive repair manuals and videos, my home repair books and videos, my index for all the info, and tons of other things I haven't thought of.
Don't think you'll ever need this stuff? Well, once you've played with having much of the stuff you need online, the need for it increases. Yea, today large amounts of data may be a lunatic fringe, but tomorrow it will be normal.
I also want less spinning disks, when you have TB of data on scsi and ide drives, failure of drives becomes more common
Now I just need to scrape up enough $$$ to purchase an EMC SAN.
Gator/Claria is Spyware.
The next trend is that hard as drives costs will continue to drop, you will see more and more of them in consumer products market, like hifi, vcr, and so on, to store music, movies, TV and radio programs, and those devices have never enough hard drive space.
One of the most stressful things for a hard disk is the spinning up and spinning down. If your hard disk is in use 24/7, then it is not being sufficiently stressed. Try telling it to power down after 10 minutes idle, and user your computer like an average office user for a year (saving work every 15 minutes), and watch the drives burn.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I've posted this before, but this time gets a disclaimer. This one isn't quite a dupe, since we got a new link. New article, new take on the subject, blahblahblah. But I make my offer anyway:
/. as a proofreader and duplicate checker. Additionally, I will assist if necessary (at a negotiable hourly rate) in adding code to automatically send the draft article blurbs to my wireless device. I am unable to proofread overnight (I have to sleep sometime), so that will have to be covered by another shift, or written off as "happy slashdot error time."
For a reasonable fee per story, I am offering my services to the editors of
Note that volunteers for the night shift and hangover/holiday time have already been obtained.
I cannot guarantee 100% error correction, but I will stake my job on significantly decreased rates of grammar and spelling mistakes, and far fewer duplicate postings.
I would also like a T-shirt that says "I work for slashdot".
Please, for the sake of your readers, hire me. I want to help!
This offer will be repeated (as is fitting) with each dupe.
They're still priced as server-class disks for holding stuff that gets used often, kinda like a huge cache. I was hoping they would start showing up in laptops, as they would have the most need of shock protection, but so far I haven't seen any. Presumably, with all the laptops being used as the *only* PC, most people want a fairly sizable hard disk and not just a few GB of SSD, and I don't think there's room for both. As for me, having both a PC + a laptop, I would certainly welcome a SSD laptop.
P.S. If you want links, check out http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's a mighty long penis.
The big difference is that the WD and Fujitsu drives were quickly and cheerfully replaced under warranty. None of the others were. Some people might argue that WD has to have a great replacement policy because their drives fail so often. My experience is that WD drives fail about as much as everyone else's.
Yeah, I mirror my data drives and keep a Ghost copy of all my boot drives on bootable CDs for when the inevitable happens, but that's just "due diligence".You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
It still amazes me that tech people can be so short-sighted.
Stop thinking with your current brain - think with the brain that you'll have in 10 years! Think about where we were 10 years ago. What was the fastest PC you could buy? I believe that the Pentium was just being released. Now I have a Pentium that just acts as my firewall, because it can't really do much else. Hard drives were around 200 MB I think. What if engineers back then said "why would you ever need more than 200 MB?" Reasons for more storage? How about 100GB on a card the size of a compact flash card. For what? How about to replace DVDs? We rip our music to the MP3 format to save space. We encode movies to save space. Ask a TiVO owner if they would like to have a TB drive. Then ask a TiVO owner who has HDTV.
Your backup issues are not relative either. How do you back up a 100MB drive? With a bigger drive. How do you back up a 10GB drive? With a bigger drive. You can see where this is going.
Think about this: Look at the way drives work now. We (well, the OS really) reuses the space on them, and has to keep track of where all the data physically resides on the disk. What if the drive was so large, say 10 TB, that you didn't need to do that? Instead of deleting something off the drive, you simply write it to a new location and move on. I know that is what happens now, but there would me less management of that data if it didn't have to consider size constraints. Now we use disks that spin, and talk about seek time and platters. With advances in storage, these could be things of the past. Who knows, maybe data will be stored in an organically organized 3D matrix of atomic-level particles, and seek time will be static. Maybe there will be no heat build-up, no moving parts to fail.
The possibilities of endless, instant-access storage would be amazing. 24/7 digital video recording for security systems. Las Vegas alone could use this. No more wondering "do I have enough space to install this?". Want to install the latest release of RedHat 23.0, just install it to a new partition (or quadrant, or whatever we have) and go.
I am just throwing out stuff here, but we have advanced pretty far in 10 years because of advancements in technology. Sure, the ideas have been there too, but the technology has to be in sync for it to take off. (Apple Newton?) I know the tech industry hasn't been around that long, but we have some history to look back on. Don't say things like "I'll never use that much space" or "Why would I need a processor that powerful?". We will need it, we will think of ways to use it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What might work is, say, a 1 gigabyte solid state module for the OS and files needed at boot (GUI, etc), for startup speed,and maybe another for the most commonly used applications. Everything else, including data, goes on large hard drives.
Best Slashdot Co
Your mileage may vary. I remember selling 5 1/4" 20 MB SCSI and ESDI drives for $1200 Cdn in 1988. Almost all of them kacked after a couple thousand hours, like a light bulb. In fact, they actually came with a label that told you, outright, how many bad sectors the drive had *from the factory*. But the 20mb ESDI on my original Compaq luggable still boots, and runs fine to this day. I turn it on once a year, when I'm feeling nostalgic.
I want to know what that *whiiiiiiine KACHLUNK* noise is, it happens about once a day with a new drive i bought a couple of months ago.
Everytime I hear it a shiver runs down my spine in fear of my investment going up in flames.
Anyone know what it is or why it happens, and if there's anything that can be done about it???
How can a post be offtopic if it's a reply to a dupe?
/. editors suck, but the /. search feature is plenty krunky as well.
There is no such thing as an offtopic reply to a dupe story.
Whenever you see a dupe, you'll see hundreds of posts, like mine here, pointing out the dupeness. And you'll see a bunch of "in soviet russia" jokes. Dupes are offtopic themselves. They don't do anything except exist as a place for people to point out that not only do the
How could an Honest Politician be on the market?
Oh, I get it. This definition must be simply that the politician tells the truth - "Hell yeah, I'll work on passing that bill if you donate $100,000 to my campaign. That, plus another $50,000 when it has passed so that I don't change my mind when elections roll around."
Nope - not my idea of "honest"
Here's a radical idea. *Don't* move the heads. Put hundreds of these magic wiskers in fixed positions so that you only get a few (20) gig from a one platter drive. Reliability will go up, access time will go down.
Also you have to take in account the amount of crap that most wysiwyg software happens to dump a shitload of nothing into documents (thx billy) so they take up waaay more that they should.
as far as I remember most dynamic ram happens to refresh a heck of a lot (something bout how long time those litlle black thingies remember the stuff, so they need more juice (and time) to refresh themselfs)
damn lameness filter
"Better, more reliable construction? Why would manufacturers do that?"
From their perspective, if their goal is to make as much money as possible, as soon as possible? Then yes continue with planned obsolesense.
From the perspective of the consumer who is tired of the cost and headache of planned obsolesence then the manufacturers are digging their own graves.
In other words. If the consumer don't demand that companies take the road that benefits the consumer (water flowing uphill), then companies will naturally take the downhill route (path that benefits them).
So the answer to the question depends on how much tolerance we have for the status quo.
So often you'll hear people say: Yeah, I've used brand X for Y years (where Y>5), and none of them have ever failed. I was one of those till recently (X=Maxtor, Y=6), until two 80Gb Maxtor drives bit the dust (one during a simple reboot, and the other one during a copy operation). If you haven't had a large capacity drive fail yet,
a) consider yourself lucky
b) back up!!!
A buddy of mine works in a data recovery company. They see all sorts of drives (brands, capacities), and according to him, the drives that fail the most are those over 60Gb, almost irregardless of the brand.
It makes sense too, if you
a) pack that much more data into a smaller space
b) spew out 10x more drives out of your factories than you used to,
something has to give.
BACK UP YOUR DATA!
"If you could only see what I've seen with your eyes..." - Roy Batty
My question is, how long until a desktop with a TByte of ram? Consider:
10 years ago, 1GB of ram was unimaginable.
20 years ago, 1GB of disc was unimaginable.
Today 1TB of ram doesn't seem any more unimaginable then those previous levels did in their day.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not just how many bad sectors, but their cylinder/head/sector numbers too. At least for the ESDI drives, that's because you'd have to manually key in the defect list when you formatted the thing. Today's drives do automatic defect management--drives still come with a list of bad sectors; the list is just stored on the platters themselves, rather than on a printed label. You can query the drive for its "P-list" (primary defect list) to get the sectors that were bad from the factory, and its "G-list" (grown defect list) to get the sectors that have gone bad since you got the drive.
I want my harddrives to be as reliable as my RAM.
Two easy solutions. Use a RAID array for your hard drives, or a hammer for your RAM.
For the first solution, if all you want is 20GB, you can buy the smallest cheapest slowest hard drives in the world, put them in a RAID array. When one goes TU, swap it out for a new one.
For the second solution, it sounds like you'll need to hit the chips really hard. If I had to guess, I'd say you have a lot of vibrations in your environment to make your hard drives die so quickly while your RAM manages to stay alive.
Add photographers to that list. I have shot close to 1G worth of still images in a day, and that is using lossy compression and a "mere" 3Mpixel camera.
Lots of older drives failed too. The drive in the Lisa (aka Mac XL...well, once new ROMs were put in) was prone to failure. I remeber the double eagle drives in the late 80s being failure prone too.
I want my car to be able to drive to mars, but it doesn't seem likely, nor does it seem likely that a highly complex mechinical device with exceptionally tight tolerences and moving parts will be as reliable as a solid state device.
I quite want a reliable drive too. Fast would be nice, very arge storage capacity would be very very nice. Affordable woud also be nice. In fact it doesn't have to be a drive, it could be something that acts like one, but FLASH ROM is still too slow (to erase, reads are fast if you design right) and too costly.
How many DVD's per square cubit is this?
I'll go ahead and agree with the parent. Sortof. I'd rather have 20GB of fast data storage than 100GB of current-speed stuff. I don't have a lot of reliability problems with hard drives, but I sure do sit and wait for head seeks.
And if she disagrees, dump her. Certainly don't ever marry her.
There are quite a few things that are quite useful that you can't do today because of lack of storage:
1) Rip your DVDs (media server) (approx 5 GB/DVD on average, new BluRay DVDs much more)
2) Record HDTV (next gen PVR) (7.2 GB/hour max for ATSC)
3) Record every channel on your cable at once (45 GB/hour approx with 100 channels at 1 Mbps)
4) Store all my DV cam footage on my hard drive (11 GB/hour)
So yes, today if I had a 1 TB drive, I could very well make use of it as could many others.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Actualy the basic theory has been around for a while, and yes, from what I've seen, the math is pretty ugly. Its kind of like the LASER. The theory had been around well befor anyone figured out how to make one. Nowadays we take LASERs for granted.
Unfortunately there is just about no way to reverse it. The first comment out of the mouth of (insert company here)'s president will be something along the lines of "We can do what ever we want. What are you going to do, stop buying HDs?" And he is 100% correct. If all the companies are playing ball then it is just a matter of choosing the lesser of several evils. The number of discerning customers is probably roughly matched or exceeded by the number of oblivious customers, so the status quo stays to the detriment of us all.