Single Disk Capacity Speculation

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demechman

Weaksauce
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
126
Has anyone charted the capacity of Hard Drives over the last few years? What does the curve look like? Also would anyone care to guess about single drive capacities at key milestones like 10Tb, 100Tb or other metrics like MTBF, throughput, or storage medium changes?

I am interested in the trend that our society is increasingly creating more data than can be maintained indefinitely. At some point in the future throughput to access data will need to at a minimum be balanced with total available capacity. When does the ability to search the data become more important than the data itself? Are we already there? Should we be looking at paring down what is stored?
 
This sounds like a homework question. Plot your own chart of year vs. capacity of harddrives. Wiki and google should have all you need.

I am interested in the trend that our society is increasingly creating more data than can be maintained indefinitely. At some point in the future throughput to access data will need to at a minimum be balanced with total available capacity. When does the ability to search the data become more important than the data itself?
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If the data is stored in an intuitive way, there should be little need for searching. I still have had no need for any desktop search utilities, built-into windows or otherwise.

Are we already there? Should we be looking at paring down what is stored?
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I don't think the response to that is universal, there is no "we". It is going to be answered differently on a per user/corporatoin/entity basis.
 
I appreciate the resonse Menelmarar, but I do not think you understood my meaning. I am thinking on a scale of around 100 years and the entire population of the planet as a base. I understand that on a per user basis it is different today and for a the short term future.

This is forum might not be the place to ask the question since I am more interested in speculation of what could be rather than what is. Sorry this sounded like a homework question. I just figured some people here might have different equations explaining the curve of storeage capacity over time as a basis for forecasting future capacities. If I use the double in maximum capacity every 2 years then I would predict 10TB drives around 2014-2015 and 100TB drives around 2027-2030. The monkey wrench here is physical limitations of the basic physics of our universe.

This question of data integrity and the viability of our information for the future seems like quite a big question that must be solved. My personal belief is that one of the things early humans did slightly better than animals was to educate and pass along information from generation. As a species humans have acquired so much understanding and information and so much is lost and discovered everyday. I probably worry too much.
 
I guess the Moore's Law "equivalent" in terms of storage space would be "Kryder's Law" - look it up. :)

But you can't always assume the current technology will remain as-is; transistor technology could be at the cusp of limitations within the next decade or so, and I've no doubt the smart minds at Intel, AMD, or whoever will come up with something new. Same with platter storage, the more you increase data density, the more chance of a URE or something like that, or different platter technologies (such as laser heaters or defined peaks and valleys in a platter) will come along - who knows? ;)
 
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