Kb, Mb, Gb, Tb, Pb, Eb?

Voltt

New Member
Remember not that long ago that a 40GB drive was huge. And not long before that a 1GB drive was seen as huge. And not long before that you have a few mb.

Give it a few years and you will have much bigger programs (some games now 20GB+) starting to push 1TB drives. few hundred TB drives will eventually be standard and we will be looking at PB drives as being big, like TB drives are now.

There are always plans to create bigger drives :)

Yeah. I guess its just a waiting game till they figure out how to make them huge. Also the the decline in price is interesting, is it something like: every year the price of 1GB is halved?
 

2048Megabytes

Active Member
It will be a while before we see petabyte hard drives. Hard drives haven't even got near 15 terabytes in storage space. I don't know what to do with all the space on my 232 gigabyte hard drive.
 

Aastii

VIP Member
It will be a while before we see petabyte hard drives. Hard drives haven't even got near 15 terabytes in storage space. I don't know what to do with all the space on my 232 gigabyte hard drive.

lol +1 on this, of my 500Gb hard drive, I have just over 20% used, and ~60% of my 200GB storage used. I personally have no use at all for such vast amounts of storage yet

5700
 

Geoff

VIP Member
lol +1 on this, of my 500Gb hard drive, I have just over 20% used, and ~60% of my 200GB storage used. I personally have no use at all for such vast amounts of storage yet

5700
I wish I was as lucky as you, my total storage is over 1TB right now. Most of it are photos and videos.

I have the following drives:

1x 300GB
1x 500GB
2x 750GB
3x 1.5TB
 

joh06937

New Member
[-0MEGA-];1472012 said:
I wish I was as lucky as you, my total storage is over 1TB right now. Most of it are photos and videos.

I have the following drives:

1x 300GB
1x 500GB
2x 750GB
3x 1.5TB

are you running backups? if not, you are brave :eek:
 

Aastii

VIP Member
[-0MEGA-];1472012 said:
I wish I was as lucky as you, my total storage is over 1TB right now. Most of it are photos and videos.

I have the following drives:

1x 300GB
1x 500GB
2x 750GB
3x 1.5TB

most of mine is games. I think the total of all 4 computers in the house is only 1.4TB
 

2048Megabytes

Active Member
It will be a long while before we see petabyte hard drives. Hard drives haven't even got near 20 terabytes in storage space (and there are 1024 terabytes in a petabyte). I don't know what to do with all the space on my 295 gigabyte hard drive. I left about 100 gigabytes of my drive unformatted because I simply did not need it.

From what I have been reading recently, hard drives larger than 750 gigabytes have a higher failure rate than 750 gigabyte and lower capacity drives.

Why do you need a hard drive with a storage capacity larger than 1 terabyte?
 

jamesd1981

Active Member
when do you think we will see a bit of a jump in hdd size, with hd video becoming common and soon 3d could become common place, what we think of as big now will be insufficient, i mean i have a 1tb spinpoint just for files and it is in the red and thats me being careful, i read a blog a while ago that seagate thought they could manage a 300 tb drive by 2010 and obviously that didn`t happen :(
 

Resurrection

New Member
It will be a long while before we see petabyte hard drives. Hard drives haven't even got near 20 terabytes in storage space (and there are 1024 terabytes in a petabyte). I don't know what to do with all the space on my 295 gigabyte hard drive. I left about 100 gigabytes of my drive unformatted because I simply did not need it.

From what I have been reading recently, hard drives larger than 750 gigabytes have a higher failure rate than 750 gigabyte and lower capacity drives.

Why do you need a hard drive with a storage capacity larger than 1 terabyte?

I am not familiar with the failure rates of the large drives these days. I do know for a fact that the 2TB drives seem to fail more frequently, but 1TB drives have been out for ages now and the technology should be pretty mature at this point of time.

I believe the bottleneck now is due to the MBR issue XP 32-bit. So drive makers see no point in pushing beyond 2TB, simply because consumers will be wondering where did the extra TBs go. There are a few 3TB drives out there, and I expect 4TB drives to be out this year.

Most people actually do need more than 1TB in their computers, especially when media files these days are so much larger. Pictures from a digicam are easily 10MB each. The videos I have downloaded over the years come up to about 700GB, which isn't a lot honestly.
 

PohTayToez

Active Member
when do you think we will see a bit of a jump in hdd size, with hd video becoming common and soon 3d could become common place, what we think of as big now will be insufficient, i mean i have a 1tb spinpoint just for files and it is in the red and thats me being careful, i read a blog a while ago that seagate thought they could manage a 300 tb drive by 2010 and obviously that didn`t happen :(

It's an interesting question. Judging from this information, it took roughly 15 years (give or take a couple) to make the jump from megabytes to gigabytes, and a similar amount of time to jump from gigabytes to terabytes. I'd guess that it would take a similar length of time to make the jump to petabytes, although there is another factor to consider. With the emergence of solid state drives, the focus of hard drive development seems to be more along the lines of reliability, affordability, and speed rather than capacity. Even though 1TB or more drives are not uncommon, I've noticed that the average consumer has little use for more than 100GB (and I consider that to be a high estimate).

Programs and operating systems no longer use a significant portion of hard drive space, so these days hard drive capacity needs relate solely to the amount of media being stored, namely video. Of course this brings up another interesting point, that streaming media is becoming more and more common and will likely replace downloaded media as the norm (if it hasn't already). In fact, as internet accessibility and speed increases, I would guess that we'll see slow down if not reversal of the increase in average storage space.

Maybe I'm just rambling, but something to think about.
 
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2048Megabytes

Active Member
I would suggest going thru and editing your videos and deleting data you do not really want. If you really feel you need everything you have buy another 750 gigabyte hard drive.

Edit: I agree with you PohTayToez on the point that the focus seems to be more and more with increasing data read and write times on hard drives not on increasing storage space. The main market just is not there in my opinion for storage larger than a 1 terabyte in the general population.
 
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