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Hitachi Predicts 3D Hard Disks by Year's End
daria42 writes "Hitachi has announced that its perpendicular, or 3D, hard disks should be out by the end of 2005." From the article: "Today, hard drives record and store data in a longitudinal fashion, with the read/write heads scanning over a horizontal plane. In perpendicular recording, data bits are aligned vertically, allowing for more data to be squeezed into a finite area. Put another way, data will go from being stored on a two-dimensional XY grid to living in a three-dimensional XYZ space."
It doesn't. Here is a more accurate description of how the technology works. The marketing droids turned "perpendicular" into "3D" to increase the hype level. This advance will probably only give an incremental improvement in density. Sigh.
You already nailed the porn angle, which can absolutely eat up almost unlimited quantitties of storage.
You might be surprised at how much storage people require for their MP3 collections. Why, ripping just my collection of actual physical CDs that I personally own runs a couple hundred gig. Not to mention, if you backup your personal collection of legally owned DVDs to xvid, you could be using up a few hundred gig for a decent home collection.
And aside from those uses, think about the incredible amount of data that builds up over time if you're an avid digital photographer taking medium to high quality photographs. Or if you are scanning the family photo albums. Or if you like to keep your paper records light, so you scan them and shred the physical copies of documents older than three or five years.
Or if you make your own home movies or edit your band's music on your PC. Or if you're backing up the important data from all the machines in your own into a central location frequently.
Damn, even just a handful of videogames will eat up hundreds of gigs after awhile. Act of War, WarCraft, Unreal Tourney 2004, and TotalWar: Rome each take up between about 3gb and 6gb.
Granted, your grandmother and your youngest brother will probably not consume much space at all. But most geeks will - and in fact, as more tech becomes available to the world and actively used (like digital cameras have in the last few years), the average person will find that they need more and more storage.
I really feel we're going to hit a terrabyte sized consumer drive within the next three years. And even that might not be enough. Game manufacturers are only now starting to distribute more games on DVD format. Remember when games used to ship on one CD? Then three, four, five and even six over time? Well, today they can fit it all on a single DVD. Give it a couple of years when they start making games with enormous quantities of animation, live-action, cut-scenes, music... and we start seeing games that come on two, three, four or five DVDs. Imagine a 30gb game!
I might sound crazy, but a decade ago, a game that would take up more than a single 600mb CD seemed absurd.