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Mass Storage Leaves Microchips in the Dust
Roland Piquepaille writes "This article from Wired Magazine looks at storage with a new angle. 'Right now I am sitting in front of a whirring 60-gigabyte hard disk that cost less than $100. Do the math: If back then 10 megabytes cost $1,000, then 60 gigabytes would have cost x, where x = $6,000,000 and "back then" = 18 years ago. I'm sitting in front of $6,000,000 worth of mass storage, measured at mid-1980s prices. We have Moore's law for microprocessors. But who's coined a law for hard disks? In mass storage we have seen a 60,000-fold fall in price -- more than a dozen times the force of Moore's law.' DeLong also looks at a non-distant future when a $100 mass storage device will hold a full terabyte. He also thinks that with disk space becoming cheaper and cheaper, we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos. This is in fact the goal of the Gordon's Bell project, MyLifeBits. You can learn more about the MyLifeBits project by reading this NewsFactor Network article. Check this column for more details."
" 'Right now I am sitting in front of a whirring 60-gigabyte hard disk that cost less than $100. Do the math: If back then 10 megabytes cost $1,000, then 60 gigabytes would have cost x, where x = $6,000,000 and "back then" = 18 years ago. I'm sitting in front of $6,000,000 worth of mass storage, measured at mid-1980s prices. We have Moore's law for microprocessors. But who's coined a law for hard disks? In mass storage we have seen a 60,000-fold fall in price --"
You mean that all this time we could have had much faster computers just by using magnetic media?
"Derp de derp."
we have jon's law.
as in the toilet.
note to harddrive manufacturers: i'm not impressed. i'm still waiting on my data to "move around".
This is just common knoledge. And if he paid 100$ for a 60gig drive, he got screwed! Thats why there cheap, cause dumbasses pay too much for drive, and the manufacs pass the savings on to ME.
I don't want to see Gordon Bell's "lifebits"
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
This really helps to put into perspective the ass-whipping I got when I installed Wing Commander 2 on my Dad's new hard drive.
"THAT 800 MB HARD DRIVE COST ME 500 DOLLARS, AND THAT GAME TAKES 72 MB?!!!"
"But dad, in 15 years that will only be 25 cents of space!"
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
but wait until the RIAA starts charging in advance for piracy. They can do $15 for an album, or charge $15000 per song ammounting to $1,485,000 for a single recordable disc (99 possible tracks).
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Record everything. Once your life is half over you need to cue up the recording and start watching what happened in the first half of your life. Then when that is over you drop dead.
Dude, seriously, what the fuck are you talking about? Process it all? Your cpu doesn't "process it all" now. If talks with what it needs do. I'm also pretty damn confused as to what you mean by negative integers? Hopefully that was some weak attempt at a buffer-overflow joke or a stack dump or something because the logical part of my brain thinks you meant you say "I will have so many mp3's that the number system itself will reset" and then I would be forced to clown on you.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
It will be a 3gig version of IIS, .Net, or whatever. The extra 2.9gigs are bundled data so you can buffer overrun yourself.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Look at the iPod... it's been out for 27 months and its capacity is up to 30GB from 5GB, or 6x. That is, on average, a doubling in size every 9 months!
:) Or if you're really insistent on the 9 months part, you could say it has increased by 81.7% every 9 months.
Please step away from the crack pipe. 2^(27/9) = 8. However, the storage capacity has only grown 6x. Perhaps you meant to say 2^(27/10.45) = 6. I.e. doubing in size every 10.5 months?
Moores Law for Microchips
(doubles every 18 mnths)
Porns Law For Storage?
The downside is that access times have tracked closer to a linear function.
Too bad it is practically a horizontal line.
18 years ago a 40 Mb HD has the size of a toaster...
Yep. Generated the same amount of heat, too.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
If SMART were to be useful, the HD would beep at you, or blink its LED, or the OS would annoy you with popup messages so you knew, "oh shit, I gotta back up my stuff to somewhere else, NOW!"
I don't think you'll be seeing that. My cynical opinion is that SMART is mostly a way to delay user awareness of a problem until the last possible moment - hopefully, after the warranty has expired.
Nope. A fragmented disk is what you get when you chuck your hard drive against a brick wall.
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.
I'd like to see Bill reduce his prices by a factor of 60,000
The correct formula is 27/log2(6) = 10.44 :-)