A Terabyte on the Desktop
Kurzweil reports this encouraging development:
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce on Monday a record for storage density on a disk drive: 230 billion bits per square inch, which would make possible a desktop computer drive capable of storing a terabyte of information.
The technology is known as perpendicular recording because the tiny magnets that represent digits are placed upright, not end to end.
I remember when I was working for a computer magazine years ago getting to try out a hard disk with an almost unimaginable size of 300 megabytes. Imagine trying to get by on so little now.
I wonder how long it will be before a terabyte seems cramped?
More details here (link requires annoying registration).
Comments
It was about 1985 or so when my uncle became the first person I knew to even have a hard drive. It held 10 megabytes.
I wondered how he could ever use all that space. I mean, the Bible is about 4 megabytes. How would he ever fill that much space with typing?
Answer: he wouldn't - the typed word was a small percentage of what he quickly filled that hard drive with. Today it's a miniscule amount of what I fill my hard drives with.
This, typing as a percentage of typical hard drive usage, would be an interesting technological indicator. I would bet there is an negative exponential curve here.
Posted by: Stephen Gordon![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.blog.speculist.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 4, 2005 10:16 AM
How long until a terrabyte seems cramped: About a year after these drives hit the market when Microsoft gets another version of Office out. ;)
Posted by: Jim Strickland![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.blog.speculist.com/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 6, 2005 12:14 PM