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