With rapidly declining storage costs, would petabyte computers be the norm?

Poll requested by Europa:

With rapidly declining storage costs, would petabyte computers be the norm ?

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Please provide a reason for your answer.

You have only one option to vote for. This poll is not multiple choice.

NEVER

I'm a sucker for deals and in the past 6 months I've bought a total of about 1.5 tb not including the 800gb I've had before. But still can't fill them

dont need it. porn addicts have to much storage already.

There is only one right answer and its yes, as its not a matter of If its a matter of When.

Games and software applications are already counted in tens of gb. Media formats keep getting higher and higher in quality and the size is growing exponentialy. I am sure eventually we will be up to exabytes, zettabytes and yodabytes, its just a matter of time.

I agree, just completely a matter of time for all kinds of technology like that. Such as the protein cds/dvds, and things of that nature.

would windows need a petabyte?

LOL maybe by 2010

A couple of quick theoretical calculations ... starting from the density of iron (7874 kg/m3) and the average atomic mass of iron (55.845 amu), and assuming a 3.5 inch platter of which 100% of the surface area is used, you come out to a theoretical maximum raw capacity of 4194 PB per platter side if we can get to the point of being able to make a single iron atom hold one bit, and be able to access it with this precision. You get similar numbers for cobalt.

It's unlikely that pure iron could support this sort of density, so you'd probably have to use some iron-based crystal. This would probably cut the area density of iron atoms by a factor of 4, say. Additionally, there would be about a 20% loss from ECC information, which means you'd top out at around 838 PB per platter side.

So it's certainly theoretically possible from a atomic density point of view to have petabyte PCs without having to change to 3D storage techniques.

Sticking to magnetic storage makes things slightly more tricky, as domain walls have inherent thicknesses that need to be considered. A quick search gave several iron compound domain wall thicknesses of ~1000 angstroms, so assuming that the platter contains nothing but domain walls that would only give about 22 TB per platter side, requiring 23 platters to reach the petabyte mark. Assuming that the hard drive manufacturers are clever and manage to cut the domain wall thickness by a factor of two (by using some other fancy compound or trick) gives a more reasonable 6 platters.

So, petabyte PCs? Eventually, IMO, especially if we get around to making a good 3D display system. But not within the next 20 years ...

Europa said:

would windows need a petabyte?

LOL maybe by 2010

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If any thing comes after vista probly... VISTA is nuts!

Hmm one of those numbers seems to be inflated. I see someones enjoying their new green powers.

Think of the question from 86......Will we ever need gigabyte drives? (95/96 we had gigabyte drives)
Think of the question from 96......Will we ever need terabyte drives? (06/07 we have terabyte drives)
Think of the question now...........Will we ever need petabyte drives?

For the unforeseeable future we will need and have bigger drives and faster computers. I'm almost positive 10 years from now my computer will be able to hold a single petabyte drive.

Excellent post emboss, as always.

Things are getting smaller as we speak. But I do not think single atom storage is possible, as at that level, quantum effects come into play and decoherence would pretty much destroy single atom "domains". Also, dipole-dipole interactions and several other phenomena impose limits on the fesability of single atom storage.

Current practical research :-
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=06-23

Yes, BUT

I think compression techniques will evolve enough that the home user is not going to need a petabyte anytime in the next 20 years. There was an article linked to from here somewhere that showed DVD quality video that will almost fit on a CD... even with technologies like HD-DVD/Blu-Ray currently needing what 16-20GB for a HD movie? Using that compression technology (sorry I don't remember what it was called) we could fit an HD on a regular DVD, Easily on a Dual layer.

disclaimer: I did not look up specifics on the numbers below, nor do I claim these are correct figures, I just did it. Sue me lol.

I voted yes, seeing as I currently have ~1.9TB of storage space and it's about 75-80% full. Most of the space is used by TV shows and movies, all of which are compressed as .avi and .mpg. The reason I don't do straight rips and whatnot is that if I did, I'd have to live in a cardboard box after buying enough hdd space.

Assuming each movie, uncompressed and ripped from a DVD = 8gb, for instance, my movies alone (500+) would take up around 4TB. @ 30 cents a gig (which is pretty da*ned good) that would be in the neighborhood of $1230.00 (based on 1024gb = TB). And that's not taking into account that hard drive gb is only 1000MB. Throw 500-600gb of .avi tv shows @ uncompressed high rez and that number quadruples.
With HD content, like BlueRay and HD-DVD becoming more and more popular, if you were to store uncompressed HD content a Petabyte would be used up faster than you think. @ 25gb per movie on BlueRay (obviously it isn't that much on average, but for comparison's sake) * 500 movies = 12.5TB. Also, that's just current technology, sh*t, in 5 years, at the current rate we could see 100-200gb movies.

Considering that I'd rather have full resolution copies of my movies and tv shows, I'd give my left testicle to have a petabyte (or multiple for that matter) of storage space.

Eventally we will. I was talking to a military programmer, 10 years ago they though their comptuers were "t3h GROOVY" with their 32mb ram and 500mb(holy cow can you imagine?) computers. Now we're hyper about Dual Core. Soon quad core will come out with the K8l. Technology will be ever expanding. Heck, in a century a petabye might be the size of ram for a prefab computer.

Actually, I foresee biological computers. Like, Zerg creep growing out of your pulsating meat sac under your desk as you play battlefield 4261. The background programs scans all your activities both on and off the comptuer. If you walk by a ford dealership, a popup will be waiting for you at home. Of course, it will also check your body. You'll have a daily newsletter: "Get a bigger pen15 2day".

Well I would like to offer some other thoughs for this table.
In 86 we would never will think that you can and will store movie or picture of your family or music on the harddrive. Harddrive was purely for programs. This is common now. We evolve our appetites evolve too. The reason we would have no problem to use 1TB , 1PT because we will find other ways to fill it up.

Think about using HDD as your CD/DVD right now or tape in the past. HDD moving very quickly into being a primary backup media. How many generations of the backup you would like to store ? 1 week, 1 month, 1 year?
What if your primary storage is 1TB already? ;-)

I hav no doubt that we would find other ways to digitize our senses too... We only target vision and hearing now.... next smell, taste and motion. Who would like to see a movie where you are part of the enviroment with all vision, sound, motion, smell , taste effects? How much storage that will take?

I think most people who buy computers would be hard pressed to fill the 250gb drives that come in our prebundled systems heh, but there are always a few who like to have all their iso's and dvds on drive.

Personally, I Could'nt. I download anime almost daily and I Game. Running 450gb and i am not even close to filling up one of the drives.
The only real point i can see is for the professional segment. Servers and databases for ginormous webdomains or workstations in film editing where all the hd video is stored on harddrive.

I think if anything, higher Density, more secure Flash memory is where the growth will be. Much faster than mechanical hard drives and more user friendly. Maybe cheaper ram drives, or the fabled holographic storage i remember reading about in some science magazine like 7 years ago.

If they build it we will come

That is, uses for large drives will become obvious as they become available. One thing I see coming is 24/7 video blogs. People will record their lives and stream video and audio to a hard drive. The law enforcement and legal issues are staggering.


BTW choice three is over 2,000 trillion dollars

that last option wasn't there when i voted... I can retract my vote?

Neur0mancer said:

Yes, BUT

I think compression techniques will evolve enough that the home user is not going to need a petabyte anytime in the next 20 years. There was an article linked to from here somewhere that showed DVD quality video that will almost fit on a CD... even with technologies like HD-DVD/Blu-Ray currently needing what 16-20GB for a HD movie? Using that compression technology (sorry I don't remember what it was called) we could fit an HD on a regular DVD, Easily on a Dual layer.

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Anyone seen the FPS game that fits in 90KB?