The Past and Future of the Hard Drive 223
Snags writes "Brian Hayes of American Scientist has written a nice little historical review of hard drive technology, from the first hard drive (nice pic) made by IBM in 1956 to what may be available in 10-15 years. He muses on how to fill up a 120 TB hard drive with text, photos, audio, and video (60,000 hours of DVD's). Kind of ironic that this came in my mailbox today considering IBM's announcement."
More space.. (Score:3, Insightful)
So of course I'm not going to fill all that space with typed notes, but even if I dont do as the article suggest and "document every moment of our lives and create a second-by-second digital diary". I still want that space for massive amounts of easily accesible data.. There's no reason I should ever have to delete anything ever again..
Uh. Except that I cant find anything I'm looking for anymore.. Can't this search function go faster?
120TB isn't that much... (Score:3, Insightful)
120 TB enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More space.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Thankfully though, it's on my own machine at home due to the falling price of technology, both hardware and software. I can work at home with the music cranked up, without people bugging me, and get stuff finished faster than in an office.
Then just pop in the 80 or 160gb removable IDE drive to drop the files on and courier them back to the client or the post-house. Great stuff, this cheap storage.
But I could still easily use 1tb or more of space to allow me to work on larger sequences, store more video, etc.
One of the great uses of this amount of space that the author suggests is something like completely capturing an entire digital sat/cable stream.
No more "using the VCR" to tape the show you're going to miss, but storing an entire weeks' worth of programming or more. Don't have to worry about missing something because you've got the entire broadcast from every channel archived and ready to watch.
That would be cool. A "central multimedia server" [like central heating?] that would store every TV program received, every radio station programmed, every CD I buy [ya, really!], every DVD I own, etc. Great use for nearly unlimited storage.
I'm sure that the old folks at the MPAA/RIAA are going into panic-mode even THINKING about that sort of idea, but it's the future folks, deal with it.
Reminds me of a conversation I had (Score:4, Insightful)
I said to him that I thought a 10 megabyte hdd would be perfect, and that someday we would be able to buy one for less then $1,000. He scoffed.
I still remember this very clearly. "Why in heavens name would you ever need that much space in a hard drive"
I worked it out, and every concievable program I'd use, including saved files, all told would only need 2 megs. It was just impossible to think up enough applications at the time that a home PC really needed.
I'd love to run into him again and ask him if he remembers that conversation. In 10 years, 100 Terrabyte drives will seem 'quaint'.
human imagination (Score:2, Insightful)
I do question some of his statements, however, particularly about human creativity:
Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: The products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can't keep up.
Or maybe it's only my imagination that can't keep up.
I'd say that the bolded part above is very likely. He states that he individually can't think of what to do with 120 TB, but collectively I'm confident we'll find a use for it. I've read through a dozen posts already where we've come up with some suggestions for use. Not to be critical or anything, but the surface has barely been scratched. It's not going to be all about data warehouses, streamable content, and how many dvd movies we can rip. Tell the whole world that 120 TB is available for storage, and a variety of uses will come up.
I'm pretty convinced that the actual consumer use of 120 TB will be for something that, if suggested now, we'll all laugh at and ask why the hell we'd want to pursue such an insane idea. For instance, the article mentioned mounting tiny cameras on eyeglasses to document one's whole life. The article also mentions home digital media hubs. Both are probably uses, but I actually think they are rather conservative ideas in the grand scheme of things. A successful idea now to think of an interesting and probably use of that much space in the future is more likely to come out of the mouth of some random guy while intermittently taking puffs out of a giant bong than any mature, prominent engineer.
Then again, some founders of successful companies were allegedly (I don't have any factual evidence) pretty fond of the herb [mac.com].
you'd keep 7 years of video? (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to think that my files would expand to fill all available space, but not anymore. Different tasks, different tools, and different personalities mean different thresholds, but I think everyone has a threshold above which they won't keep their disks full. For me, my disks stopped being full around 10 gigs. My wife's antique PC (running msdos 2.0 and used strictly as a text editor) had a 15 meg drive and never went above 10% full. Obviously your threshold is higher, but I'm sure it exists.
Even after they hit their thresholds, most people's use will grow over time, but slowly. We'll also start writing things in ways that don't try to conserve disk space. Compression will be used almost exclusively for data transmission. Future filesystems will probably keep every version of every file ever saved. (Hopefully with an option to delete the occasional residue of an indiscretion and accidental copy of /dev/hda). But even these things won't increase our use by us more than a factor of 10 or so. If we really do get 120TB drives, we won't talk about buying new ones very often.
Re:Reminds me of a conversation I had (Score:2, Insightful)
speed (Score:2, Insightful)