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There's No End In Sight For Data Storage Capacity (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: Several key technologies are coming to market in the next three years that will ensure data storage will not only keep up with but exceed demand. Heat-assisted magnetic recording and bit-patterned media promise to increase hard drive capacity initially by 40% and later by 10-fold, or as Seagate's marketing proclaims: 20TB hard drives by 2020. At the same time, resistive RAM technologies, such as Intel/Micron's 3D XPoint, promise storage-class memory that's 1,000 times faster and more resilient than today's NAND flash, but it will be expensive — at first. Meanwhile, NAND flash makers have created roadmaps for 3D NAND technology that will grow to more than 100 layers in the next two to three generations, increasing performance and capacity while ultimately lowering costs to that of hard drives."Very soon flash will be cheaper than rotating media," said Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory at SanDisk.
if i can simply carry around enough movies and music and TV to last me a few months to a year?
The big purchasers of storage want the opposite. They prefer cheap capacity over reliability. All their data is replicated multiple time so losing a storage device is nothing to them, the data just auto-replicates to other devices.
It doesn't seem like you're counting bit rot in your failures.
Garbage is actually filled with valuable substances. GIGO is more applicable to older, discrete entry systems which have specific analysis paths.
Consider real garbage in your trash, or in transfer station, or in a landfill. It generally has no value - it's garbage. But at a larger and larger scale it begins to have, statsitically, more valuable material in it. Now consider minerals trapped in the earth. We regularly process millions of metric tons of earth to refine and process into the elements we need.
A truck full of garbage is a smelly mess. An earth full of garbage is a resource which can be mined for nearly anything you need. That's why all the trash we put in Google has greater value as the total amount of garbage they collect increases. It's still garbage...but at that scale it can be refined into money.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
2005: DVD-RWs are cheap enough to time-shift a huge movie collection onto DVDs. But completely and utterly impractical to give copies to your friends.
2015: Hard drives are cheap enough to time-shift a huge movie collection onto a single hard drive. Now possible to give subsets to friends on smaller portable drives.
2025: Memory sticks are cheap enough to amass a huge movie collection on a single small memory stick. Also now cheap enough to send the entire collection to friends.
2035: Nonvolatile memory storage is cheap enough to retain copies of all movies ever produced, at 4K and 8K resolution.
This post on Slashdot reminds me of previous post on Slashdot from 2012 about 60TB 3.5 inch and 10TB 2.5 inch drives by 2016. Again it was based on Seagate's 2006 patent on heat assisted magnetic recording. I think it is more realistic at his point to expect LTO tape to provide 220TB storage than Seagate making good on it's dream of HAMR drives. This latest claim should be an indication of how much trouble Seagate is having with their heat-assisted technology. They are essentially giving themselves a 4 year extension to achieve only a third of the results that they previously claimed.