Want a ~40 TeraBytes Seagate HDD? Have to wait a decade but it's coming alright.

[Farid]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72387-0.html

Their current solution to this problem is recording data perpendicular to the plane of the media. This technology, however, is expected to peak out at about 1 terabit per square inch. In the next decade, Seagate plans to hit the market with twin technologies that could fly far beyond, ultimately offering as much as 50 terabits per square inch. On a standard 3.5-inch drive, that's equivalent to 300 terabits of information, enough to hold the uncompressed contents of the Library of Congress.

You hear this weeping sound? Yeah, it's a MPAA or RIAA representant crying himself to sleep.

 

[Rainbow Man]

Who don't love big HDDs. What we don't like is whrn it takes 3 weeks just to format it to capacity..

That's one huge basket with a whole lotta eggs in it. Drop one of those suckers and a LOT of data's going to get ruined.

I was wary when the first consumer 1GB HDDs appeared (5.25" full-height, if you guys are old to remember such beasties tey were like 2 optical drives stacked in size and DAM heavy). I felt it was risky and insecure.

Maybe I was wrong then (probably heh) but I'm probably not wrong in feeling it'd be a dumb thing o do to collect 30TB of data on a single harddrive.

As if any normal person could ever amass that much anyway. We're probably saved by that virtual barrier heh.


Peace.

 

[ANova]

I have to ask, why?

 

[willardjuice]

I have to ask, why?

Perhaps one day we will be able to legally back up our High-Def movies. At 30-50GB per pop, we will eventually need more space.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Pictures, videos and games with lots of content.

I have to ask, why?

 

[Natoma]

I have to ask, why?

1990: Why would you need more than 10MB of HD space?
2000: Why would you need more than 10GB of HD space?
2007: Why would you need more than 1TB of HD space?

If you build it, they will come.

 

[ANova]

Maybe, however 40 TB is a huge jump from the 300-500GB drives available now in just a five year period like the article suggests. I would honestly be very surprised if there are any games out five years from now that use more than 20GB of space. You would have to be quite the pirate or spender to fill 40 TB of space with movies, even 1080p.

 

[Skrying]

Maybe, however 40 TB is a huge jump from the 300-500GB drives available now in just a five year period like the article suggests. I would honestly be very surprised if there are any games out five years from now that use more than 20GB of space. You would have to be quite the pirate or spender to fill 40 TB of space with movies, even 1080p.

There's several games out already that take upwards of 15GB, I certainly imagine in 5 years we will be double that.

 

[ANova]

Really? Every current game I've come across seems to be in the 3-6GB range including games like HL2, Oblivion and NFS Carbon. I imagine the stuff soon coming out like Crysis and Gears of War may be in the range of 15GB but that should be the now high range. Ok, so maybe they'll be more like 40 or 50GB 5 years from now. Still pretty small compared to 40TB.

 

[Skrying]

Really? Every current game I've come across seems to be in the 3-6GB range including games like HL2, Oblivion and NFS Carbon. I imagine the stuff soon coming out like Crysis and Gears of War may be in the range of 15GB but that should be the now high range. Ok, so maybe they'll be more like 40 or 50GB 5 years from now. Still pretty small compared to 40TB.

Unreal 2004 came out in 2004 and was over 7GB, and I believe the new Total War approaches 15GB and I know Dark Messiah uses upwards of 7GB on disk alone before being uncompressed and installed. If Crysis is a long game then I would expect it to be fairly huge, especially if it uses a lot of unique high resolution textures and art assests. Adding to the fact that over time your game install can tend to really blow depending on the game, using Unreal 2K4 as a example again if you have many of the community map packs installed and such I'd say it easily gained another 2GB or 3GB in size.

 

[Albuquerque]

Maybe, however 40 TB is a huge jump from the 300-500GB drives available now in just a five year period like the article suggests. I would honestly be very surprised if there are any games out five years from now that use more than 20GB of space. You would have to be quite the pirate or spender to fill 40 TB of space with movies, even 1080p.

Just look at the examples above, which are relatively close...

10MB -> 10GB = three orders of magnitude increase over ten years
10GB -> 1TB = two orders of magnitude increase over seven years; slowing perhaps?
1TB -> 40TB = one and not quite half orders of magnitude increase over five-ish years? Not too far off...

As someone jokingly mentioned, build it and they will come.

 

[3dilettante]

I am not looking forward to having to defrag a 40 TB drive, or running a disc scan, or antivirus scanning.
They'll probably have 1 PB drives by the time I'm done running Scandisk on my 40TB.

There would need to be some kind of continuous background task for each of those. Finally, a use for all those multicores that doesn't include the 500 Gigs of spyware I'll have.

 

[Killer-Kris]

The first thing that comes to my mind is digital photos and movies. I currently have over 15GB of pictures from just the last two years and that's with a 3M pixel camera. That camera recently bit the big one and I've been looking at the digital camcorders, particularly the ones with internal HDD, most of which are 20-30GB. I sure would like to be able to back that data up somewhere a little safer.

So I know that in just a few years I'll likely be wanting HDD with tens of terrabytes, if not sooner.