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

[greenmaji]

I donno if i will every have enough porn to justify a petabyte.

blueray, HD-DVD, 3-D, full body suit interactive, or mind link/meld

 

[Phrenetical]

sounds hot

but does anyone else see a problem with porn of that quality, way to much detail....

^_^

 

[~(o)-(0)~]

I have 750 gigs at home and I really can't fill it all, and I know alot of people who are still running 80gig drives and they aren't out of space. As long as you don't store alot of media you don't need tons of space.

 

[deathman20]

I could see easily having bigger drives.

Of course probably be a decade or 2 more but it will come. I got over a terrabyte of storage at home but most of it is used for redundancey.

 

[phantasm]

I could see 1TB in a RAID-5 setup (effectively 500GB) of space as the right amount.

A Petabyte though... wow. I remember when the biggest HD was 10MB. lol.

 

[MadMatt2600]

I wish I had a petabyte hard drive.

 

[sunama]

I voted no.

But I took the survey to mean sometime soon, like a decade or so. I also took the survey to mean desktop PCs. So thats a definite no.

Gotta disagree with you strongly there dude. I have a desktop which has 1.3TB of combined HD space. I am currently running low on hard disk space and will certainly be using 1PB+ hard disks when they are released.

Now some people in here may not make full use of hard disk space - they may be content to watch dvds, off a dvd disk for example, but some of us, like myself, have other uses for their PC - of which is as a Home Theatre PC. I currently have many many GBs of video files, stored on my pc that I output direct to my projector for home cinema viewing. Some movies in HD take up 12GB each. In time, this will increase. Keep in mind, Im not running a business, I am a home user with a desktop.

As hard disks increase in storage capacity, we/I will find new ways of filling them. Some people, like Neuromancer may never need more than 1 TB of hard disk space (as the functionality of their PC is very limited), but others like myself need as much hard disk space as possible.

People who think that desktop PCs wont be equipped with 1PB+ hard disks seem to have learnt nothing from the past. We will always need faster CPUs & bigger hard disks. I guess some people never learn.

 

[E_tron]

We will need to store holograms, 1080p movies, and super massive data black holes somewhere.

The extra storage is nice when one works with uncompressed 1080p video(does anybody do that?).

 

[Shell]

I have a 74Gb and a 500Gb Hard Drive at the moment...
So far I've used 70 and 460Gb.

Mabe I'll have 1Tb in a year, but it'll probaly be many years before I can find a use for 1 petabyte.

I had 2 2Gb drives back in the P1-133mhz era.
Then I had 2 20Gb drives in the P2-250 era.
Then I had dual 30Gb's in the P3-Coppermine era.
Then I had an 80Gb HDD, then bought a second 80Gb for editing and such. For my P4-1.8Ghz.
Now I have a 74 and a 500...

4Gb, 40Gb, 60Gb, 160Gb, 574Gb, I'm guessing I'll need a petabyte in about 6+ years...

 

[Sleepy_Steve]

I know on my current rig... it has 560gb of storage. And its pretty well filled. I can still defrag most of them, but only just.
My conroe to be built soon will have more than double that and land my in the 1TB+ club.

My first rig, was for its time relativley modern. 100mhz, 32mb ram, and an 850mb hard drive. Now i look at the clutter near my desk and see over 2tb in storage. Im only 19 now, and im pretty sure that might have been less than ten years ago.

With the way games, and windows bloatware are going... I think it is foreeable to find us looking at petabyte systems in the not too distant future. 23gb for my vanguard beta folder, and i know a ton of things like movies and high def tv series captured in raw formats are only gona suck more and more realistate on our drives.

 

[Sleepy_Steve]

seek time may be an issue when we get into PB on the desktop... But if i remember a tour of a datacenter a while back, they were already into the PB levels. Its only a mater of time before desktop users catch up to that.

 

[sunama]

seek time may be an issue when we get into PB on the desktop...

I dont think so. We have increased hard disk capacities in typcial desktop drives in 1998 from 6GB to 750GB in 2006. Thats more than a 100x increase. Seek times have not increased.

 

[deathman20]

Damn Vanguard is that large? Thought it was bad with the LOTR beta (8+gig if not mistaken) or FSX (13-14Gig if im right). That just takes the cake, and then some. Wonder what that will come on, a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray lol

 

[deathman20]

I dont think so. We have increased hard disk capacities in typcial desktop drives in 1998 from 6GB to 750GB in 2006. Thats more than a 100x increase. Seek times have not increased.

What hes refering to IMO, is that while drive compacities have increased considerably, the seek time has basically stayed still, bearly edging forward. That can be a huge issue with a large disk trying to find data.