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The terabyte drive and the end of bigger drives

The recent development of the 1TB hard drive reminded me of my first thoughts about the end of the hard drive expansion. Back when the 1 GB drives came out I calculated my total lifetime media need. It came out under 10TB and half of that was video:

1TB 200,000 books at 5MB/book (every book I’ll read or know about)
1TB 200,000 songs, 5MB/song (every song I’ll ever hear)
3TB 3000 movies, 1GB/movie (every movie I’ll watch or desire to watch)
1TB 300 TV show seasons, 3GB each (ditto)

Personal records:
1TB 500,000 photos, 2MB/photo (every photo I’ll take or see)
1TB 2000 hours home video, 500MB/hr (fun to shoot, but who will watch it?)
0.001 TB (every word I’ll write, email, publish)
0.1TB 1GB/year (saved email and internet cruft, LOL cats, etc.)

It sums up to 8TB/life. And indexes, you definitely need indexes, so say 1TB for indexes.

This will expand as high res video/photos phase in but even that won’t push this out much beyond 100TB.

300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day for 100 years at 500MB/hr (one camera angle). No compression for time spent watching your self-video is assumed. :)

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