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What would you do with a 500,000,000,000 Gigabyte hard drive?
Hitachi recently announced that they will be shipping a 4 terabyte hard drive in 2011. One terabyte hard drives are now available for $320, so it you can expect 4 terabyte drives will be in this same price range within a short number of years. (4 terabytes = 4,000 gigabytes = 4,000,000 megabytes.)
Recently one of my friends sent me this link that tracks hard drive pricing over time. In 1956, IBM was selling 5 megabytes for $50,000 which equates to $10,000 per megabyte. So in 1956, four terabytes of hard drive storage would have cost $40 billion dollars. Yes, $40 billion dollars for the storage that will be on a single hard drive in 2011. ($10,000 x 1,000 x 1,000 x 4)
So if this rate of decreasing cost per unit of hard drive storage continues at the same rate through 2066, would be able to buy a 500,000,000 terabyte (500 exabyte) hard drive for around $320 if fifty years or so. Five hundred million terabytes is a huge number when you think about it in 2007 – just like 4,000,000 megabytes (4 terabytes) seemed like a huge amount of storage in 1956.
To put a five hundred million terabyte hard drive in perspective, consider how much storage is available on all hard drives currently in use today. According to Disk/Trend, hard drive factories produced between 450 million and 460 million hard drives in 2006. If you assume the average size of a hard drive manufactured in 2006 was 100 GB, that hard drive factories will produce about 40% more capacity in 2007 and produced about 40% less capacity in 2006 (following the rate of change of Moore’s Law) and that hard drives remain in use 3 years, then the total capacity of all hard drives in use on the planet at the end of 2007 will be about 140,000,000 terabytes (140 exabytes).
So this means that if prior trends continue, a typical hard drive in 2066 would have a capacity equal to about 3 times all the storage capacity of all the hard drives in the world today. I may be off by an order of magnitude or more and/or a decade or more, but the point is that that previous trends suggest that your grandchildren’s hard drive will be as big as all the hard drives currently on the planet. What would you do with all this data storage? Or maybe a better question is what will our grandchildren do with all this storage?
Chris
so many thoughts, so little space...
I assume you are using the term "hard drive" as a metaphor for an unknown future storage medium. While it is certainly possible that the hard drive will survive the next 50 years in a recognizable form, I doubt it. I strongly believe holography, bio-storage or something not yet conceived will have long replaced the hard drive by then.
Given the rate of production of [in my opinion] absolutely useless content created by Generation Me and its parents (exhibit A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kWyldLgpbs), it isn't difficult to imagine that our children and grandchildren will have no problem exceeding the capacity of whatever storage medium exists in 50 years. I suspect our grandkids will want to capture and share every waking moment of their lives in mega ultra high definition for playback on their 144" organic led screens.
Sadly, an enormous amount of resources will be wasted to preserve, protect and distribute this content if we don't do something about it. In fact it is already happening today, and companies like Google and YouTube are facilitating it. YouTube recently upped its maximum file size ten-fold, from 100MG to 1GB, with a maximum video length of 10 minutes.
Imagine a 100MB video clip downloaded a mere 100k times..a consumption of 10 terabytes of bandwidth to move the content, and up to another 10 terabytes to store it [for clips that can be saved locally]. YouTube revealed that 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006...one company, 250 petabytes of bandwidth. And many tens of thousands of new videos are uploaded each day, and replicated multiple times across their vast server farm.
While Telcos and content providers have been battling over who is going to foot the bill for bandwidth consumption, few stories in the news have covered the environmental impact. I wish people would recognize and understand that their silly little unnecessary clips consume valuable resources. But, I have very low expectations that future generations will create and distribute content that offers value at least equal to its cost.