About five years ago, I wrote a piece for the now-defunct Business 2.0 about storage technologies and how we’d have terabytes on our iPods. Well, our iPods are not that fat but our drives are getting fatter for sure. Seagate today announced what it’s calling the world’s first 3-terabyte external desktop drive (dubbed FreeAgent GoFlex), which costs about $250. First of all, that is a massive amount of storage capacity — and it’s cheap. Atwo years ago paid more than $1,500 to build a 2-terabyte networked storage system using BuffaloTech LinkStation and Apple Time Capsule. And here we are getting a disk for so cheap. Seagate thinks that an increase in HD movie downloads will push people into buying bigger drives. It can fit up to 120 HD movies.
In the ’90s, a 5MB Corvus hard disk for our student scheduling cost about $5K.
Four years later, I paid $125 for an upgrade of my personal Mac from 250MB to 4.3GB.
In 2002, I paid $100 for a 40MB external.
Last month it was $104 for a 1TB internal.
Now what I am waiting for is SSDs to be as inexpensive as the HDDs.
Don, I have to say those SSd prices have come down quite bit but that market is production constrained thanks to the growing number of mobile gadgets. I seriously hope they bring those prices down.
I believe in the past there have been predictions about an absolute density limit for hard drives, but the manufacturers continue rapidly increasing the density as if an absolute limit doesn’t exist. Maybe one day a 5″ drive will hold a petabyte. If anyone says it’s not possible, my response is: Don’t bet on it.
Rich I would second that — never say never to what the disk drive makers will do 🙂
Hard disk capacities are starting to have the same effect on the public that moon landings did after the first couple. 3TB is big, certainly for a single drive, but not particularly big when you consider what’s out there with all the cheap RAID hardware available now. Personally, I’ve been adding storage to my home network in a haphazard manner for a few years and figure I have around 21TB online if everything is turned on at once.
It will be interesting to see how far capacity can be pushed. Error correction rates have increased faster than information density which doesn’t bode well for any application that requires absolute data fidelity.
Wow three terabytes now that is a lot of information holding potential. The servers will never be the same