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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."
No only the price, the size of the drives. 18 years ago a 40 Mb HD has the size of a toaster...
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
In general the problem is that while capacities have lept up, the rate at which we can read/write to those drives has not kept pace. It's not so bad for the iPod in particular, but at some point it's going to be a real problem for desktops and laptops, assuming our appetite for capacity grows as the capacity does.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Bloat will kill the increase in storage available - one way or the other. It'll be a 3gig version of word, or windows movie maker that will only save in raw, non-compressed video. Anything to drive the market. We've seen it with processor speeds, if HD prices keep dropping I'm sure well see it with storage as well.
Come on, is XP is SO far ahead of NT 4 that it requires 4x the ram? Of course not. But what MS reccomends, PC manufacturers will have to yield to.
He's predicting only a tearbyte for a $100 in 2012. Right now desktop drives are about a dollar a GB. So, he's predicting about a 10 fold increase in the next 9 YEARS!!! What have we seen in the last 9 years, about 100 fold increase?
If that rate continues, some day hard drives will become so large that processesors will not have the power to process it all....
I will know that day has arrived when the length of my winamp playlist rolls over into negative integers. :)
Muerte
An interesting feature of OpenNap is that it tells you exactly how many MB of files are out there for your downloading pleasure. I used to be blasted away at the large number. Sometimes I could get it up to 1 or 2 pedabytes.
A terabyte is 1000 gigs. You can get a terabyte of storage today for $1000 dollars. One dollar per gig. It's insane. Soon it will be a dollar a terabyte. We wont need things like divx anymore. We'll be looking for ways to increase the quality of our recording devices so that the video, image and audio files will take up more space. Nothing else really requires a large amount of storage.
The one limited is network speed. Sure, if I've got enough room for a collection of 2 gigabyte raw avi movies, that's great. But if I can't get enough speed to download them quickly it will suck.
Storage aint worth crap if you dont' got enough stuff to fill it.
Remember the days when DOS games would ask questions like this
minimum install (if you're low on space)- 50MB
standard install (reccommended)- 100MB
big install (runs faster)- 250MB
CRAZY INSTALL (no cd required!) - 500MB!!!
those were the days...
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Moore's law is largely due to manufacturing improvements in which the feature size of transistors keeps becoming smaller, such that you can get (approximately) twice as many transistors in the same amount of space. (yes, yes, I know, die sizes keep growing, but not nearly at the pace at which transistors shrink.) The tricky part here is that this shrinking has generally been coupled with ramping up frequency. Increasing the capacity of a disk has no such benefit due to the fact that mechanical parts (disk heads, spinning platters) are the overwhelming determining factors for performance. Hence, the gap between processor performance and disk performance is being exacerbated - we can only make a disk spin & heads move so fast.
It's an interesting comparitive trend to notice (between processor performance growth & disk capacity to see the effect on the overall system), but you can't really compare the way disks have improved with the way microprocessors have.
Except that processors don't just give up the ship randomly(well, except in VERY rare circumstanecs)- drives do it all the time; it's almost expected. I don't give a crap about another 20GB or $20 off, I want a hard drive that won't turn itself into a paperweight after a year or two. If I'm going to own the drive for 5 years, what's another $20?
SMART was an improvement, but most OS's(linux included) don't even recognize SMART info out of the box. Even if you've got the SMART utilities installed and the kernel modules etc, /var/log/messages is so noisy, I mostly ignore it- same for Win2k boxes, Event Manager is full of TONS of crap(thank god it has filtering, but still...) 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 had an ancient 4GB Digital drive I got second-hand, in the early 90's; it was already several years old when I got my hands on it, so it was probably pre-90's. It weighed a ton, took up the full space of a 3.5" drive bay, and even had its own little suspension system. I abused that thing to hell and back, carrying it in bookbags, cooking it when the fan on the external case died...the whole nine yards. I think I low-level formatted it a dozen times(something you're not supposed to do often on SCSI drives, supposedly). It only finally gave up the ship around '99, when it spent a couple months cooking itself to death hooked up "temporarily" to a machine I forgot about.
Meanwhile, I've lost two quantum drives(one laptop, one Ultra2 3.5") and my athlon's Maxtor drive is making funny noises every once in a while. None of them were more than 2, 3 years old TOPS. WTF? The excuse seems to be that consumers don't need the reliability corporate users 'demand'.
Home users users have, at the very least, equal needs as business users, because while businesses need to keep going 24x7, they often have backups, clusters, RAID units, etc. Most home users don't have any of their data backed up, RAID is practically unheard of among the jane-and-bob computer users, and of course no clustering.
Please help metamoderate.
Drives today have 10.000 rpm or 15.000 rpm. Eight years ago the high end was 7200 rpm, 5400 before that...
;)
That's approximately a 2X performance increase per EIGHT YEARS. This is very very far from being impressive.
Disk seek time is dominated (today) by rotational latency. The fastest disks have seek times around 4ms, and that is pretty much the rotational latency on a 15000 rpm disk.
In order to improve disk performance (the seek time, not the throughput), disks need to spin faster. This does pose some interesting problems though...
A normal 3.5" drive has a platter with approximately 48mm radius, giving roughly 0.3 meter circumference. At 15000rpm the speed of the circumference is 75.4m/s.
Doing the math, this gives us a centripetal acceleration of v^2/r = 118435 m/s^2, or roughly 12085G. Sure as hell beats most drag racers out there (by more than a factor of 12000
The fun part is, that a simple doubling of the rotational speed, will do really interesting things to the acceleration (note the v^2 thing above).
A 30000rpm disk will have a centripetal acceleration of the circumference of approximately 48000G.
A mass-element at the circumference weighing one gram, will have a "pull" corresponding to (F=m*a) 118kg - which again will be approximately half a tonne on the 30000rpm disk.
You need to find a material that will weigh little, not deform under the given stress, and still have the necessary properties for use as a hard drive platter...
Moores is the # of transistors/processing power every 18 mos... you're looking at price per byte.
lets see what $100 gets you
$100/meg = 1985 10 meg
$50/meg = 1986.5 20 meg
$25/meg = 1988 40 meg
$12.5/meg = 1989.5 80 meg
$6.25/meg = 1991 160 meg
$3.13/meg = 1992.5 320 meg
$1.56/meg = 1994 640 meg
$0.78/meg = 1995.5 1.2 g
$0.39/meg = 1997 2.4 g
$0.19/meg = 1998.5 4.8 g
$0.09/meg = 2000 9.6 g
$0.04/meg = 2001.5 18.6g
$0.02/meg = 2003 37.2g
$0.01/meg = 2003.5 74.4g
Looks like the curve is a bit faster than every 18 mo... I think 12 months might be a better approximation of storage/cost.
meh
"Basically if programmers still gave a damn like they did when writting code for C64's we wouldn't have alot of these issues. Nowdays they would rather churn out crap so long as it's better than some of the other crap they've seen."
If you're trying to tell me we should go back to the days of non-portable assembly, I think I'm going to cry. Yes, people should write tighter code, but trying to make believe that we should write code just like in the "good old days" is ignoring years upon years of advancement in the field of computer science.
And, also, look at what they were doing back in the days of the C64, and look at what they're doing now. You really do need more code to do more. Trying to tell me that they had 6kb executables with the C64 and then telling me our 6mb ones are bloated is ludicrous.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I remember the 486 with a 255 MB hard drive we had when I was in middle school. My Dad was pissed because DOS and Windows 3.1 took up nearly 70 MB of precious storage space when the version of DOS that came with our old Tandy 1000 EX fit on a single 5.25 inch floppy diskette. Dad was even more pissed when I filled the drive with games, WAV files, and pictures. Back then, I was excited whenever I was able to free up another 750 kilobytes of disk space. Then there were the hard decisions...is removing Rise of the Triad, my all-time favorite game, worth freeing over 20 megabytes?
When I started college I bought a Pentium with a 4 gigabyte hard drive. Unlimited storage space! Well, until a friend showed me this awesome new program called "Winamp."
To this day, I'm very frugal with disk space. My home directory resides on a 60 gigabyte drive split into 3 20 gigabyte partitions, and I'm only using 17% of one partition right now.