How much disk space on your development machine?

sje · Post by **sje** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 1:40 am

How much disk space on your development machine?

(Select the closest value.)

Dann Corbit · Post by **Dann Corbit** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 3:04 am

You can buy a terrabyte for very little now:
http://www.nextag.com/terabyte-drive/search-html

sje · Post by **sje** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 5:08 am

Yes, and you have to buy these in pairs as the only practical way to back up a 1 TB drive is to copy its contents to another 1 TB drive.

Other than a high definition video library, is there any mainstream application that needs one or more terabytes of storage?

If flash memory technology keeps up its current rate of advancement, then traditional hard drives may become obsolete in a few years. Already there are IDE adapters for swapping out a hard drive for a 32 GB flash memory assembly in a notebook.

Guetti · Post by **Guetti** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 8:56 am

Yes, devices in molecular biology a catching up fast in storeage usage, ie. the Imagestream system:

www.amnis.com

The Imagestream system is a flow cytometer that counts up to 15'000 cells per minute and can make 6 pictures of each cell. One sample run with 10'000 cells require around 0.5 Gigabyte of storeage, and you would usually do many of these per day.

mjlef · Post by **mjlef** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 9:26 am

sje wrote:Yes, and you have to buy these in pairs as the only practical way to back up a 1 TB drive is to copy its contents to another 1 TB drive.

Other than a high definition video library, is there any mainstream application that needs one or more terabytes of storage?

If flash memory technology keeps up its current rate of advancement, then traditional hard drives may become obsolete in a few years. Already there are IDE adapters for swapping out a hard drive for a 32 GB flash memory assembly in a notebook.

Compiling Microsoft Vista!

sje · Post by **sje** » Thu Jun 21, 2007 10:19 pm

How about music collections? Say it takes 8 MB for a typical 256 Kbps sampled music track. So that's 128 tracks per GB and about 128K tracks per TB. There are probably some collectors that actually have that much music.

In terms of listening time, 1 TB of digital music would be very close to one year of constant playing.

Zach Wegner · Post by **Zach Wegner** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 12:51 am

sje wrote:How about music collections? Say it takes 8 MB for a typical 256 Kbps sampled music track. So that's 128 tracks per GB and about 128K tracks per TB. There are probably some collectors that actually have that much music.

In terms of listening time, 1 TB of digital music would be very close to one year of constant playing.

I am a live music collector and have a nice sum of music. It's stored as lossless (typically around 800 kbps) or on normal audio CDs. I'd say if I added everything in my collection (hundreds of CDs, a little over 150 GB on my hard drive) stored at 800 kbps, I'd have about 500 GB of music. I know for a fact there are users in the live music trading community that have multiple terabytes of music saved.

sje · Post by **sje** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 3:05 am

My sense of hearing is generally not able to differentiate between 256 Kbps AAC sampling and lossless recording. Perhaps thirty years ago it would have been a different story. All of my CD collection was sampled at 128 Kbps and it fits on a 10 GB iPod, so I don't need more storage than that. Perhaps if CDs start selling at reasonable prices I might start buying them again. I refuse to buy any music online if there is any DRM involved.

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I read a review of Hitachi's new 1 TB drive. After formatting, the real storage is only 931 GB, although that's still quite a lot. Personally, I'd wait a while before buying as the general reliability of new, higher capacity hard drive models has been not so good lately. I'd also go for a unit that had at least a three year warranty.

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My first system with a hard drive was an 8086 machine purchased in 1984 that had a 5.25 inch, full height 10 MB Winchester. The whole system cost close to US$4,000 and it took many months to pay off the loan. Alas, the annoyances of segmented programming and MS-DOS meant that I only got two years out of it before going to a Mac Plus in late 1986 with a pair of 20 MB SCSI drives.

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How much storage is needed for a chess game library? I'd guess that all of the serious master level games ever played with at least one human player could fit into 32 GB uncompressed. Adding blitz games and better quality program only games might double this, and perhaps there's about three or four GB of annual growth.

sje · Post by **sje** » Wed Jun 27, 2007 2:16 pm

If you can get by with only 64 GB, then there's a solid state solution. See:

http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/Pres ... 0000356219#

sje · Post by **sje** » Thu Jun 28, 2007 3:06 am

Looks like a weighted average of about 512 GB.

That's close to fifty thousand times larger than my first hard drive back in back in 1984.

How many more years until petabyte storage in commonplace?