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.