What are you going to do with your petabyte?
So, I just upgraded my home computer from 500GB of storage that was 95% used to 2.0TB that’s now only 25% used.
That’s a fairly big jump, but the funny thing is, I imagine using up 2.0TB of content in another couple of years. The biggest users of space on my system are photos (150GB) and music (200GB), with lots of other GB used up with random “small” files and my operating system. I can easily take photos (in JPG format, even) at the rate of about 4GB/week if I’m active with my camera. If I use RAW, I could likely do 4GB/day.
It’s very likely that hard drive space is going to continue to grow, even if the world switches to solid-state storage in the next decade, I’d still expect to be able to buy 1PB (one petabyte = 1,000 terabytes) of storage at your local computer store by the year 2020 for somewhere in the $100 price range. Even if the industry switches to SSD technology, I’d expect a 100TB SSD drive to be in this price range by then. (so if this happens, just divide the numbers below by 10).
The question is: What will be filling that space up with? CCDs on cameras aren’t really getting that much bigger, and we’ve already got plenty of storage for photos. Music isn’t getting any more bytes than 44kHz * 16bits * 2 channels, and HD video at approximately 20Mbps is pretty reasonable.
1PB = 111,111 hours (12.6 years) of HD video @ 20Mbps
1PB = 26.66 million 10 megapixel images stored as raw 30-bits per pixel
1PB = 1.5 million hours (179 years) of uncompressed 44kHz stereo audio
So, what do you think you’re going to do with your PB?
Backup One Subroutine of my holographic doctor.
In all seriousness: i don’t think we’ve seen the end in the pixel craze with HD. And – who seriously knows if 3D isn’t feasable? Maybe in some sort of fishtank like apparatus first. Storing 1920x1920x800 will become very, very interesting.
My money says you use it up far sooner than 2 years. As our storage size increases, the rate of generation of bytes increases too – perhaps not quite 1:1 but linear nevertheless. So you should be all done with that 2T in a year