When's Toyota Going To Make Prius Hard Drives?
from the not-worried dept
Analyst firm IDC is getting some attention today for a study that warns of a coming (cue ominous music) storage shortage, as the amount of data that gets created outstrips the world's supply of storage. The firm cites online video, and the ease with which it can be copied, as being a major contributor to the data boom. Some are pointing out that IDC's claim simply doesn't make sense, since it's impossible to produce data above and beyond what can be stored. IDC's message sounds a little bit like what we were talking about yesterday with oil. People have been warning about a coming oil shortage for years, but technology that allows us to keep finding more, and use what we have more efficiently, which continually pushes back the day that we run out. There's no doubt that in the next few years, storage will continue to get cheaper, allowing the exploding demand for it to be met. If you're worried about this, consider how much data we're producing today compared to, say, 10 years ago. Seems like we did fine meeting this need.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Re:
Now draw the connection with hard drive space.
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1: braindead and make s no sense; check
2: uses the term "LOL" ; check
I'm sorry sir your kind are not wanted on the internet, please press and hold the alt key, while doing this please also press the F4 key, then burn your hard drive while chanting "I will never use a computer again"
thank you for you cooperation.
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Be nice...
And if you are going to insult someone, don't do it anonymously. That's called cowardice.
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Econ 101
I remember posting to the Motley Fool some years ago discussing investing in EMC - someone said that the demand for storage was expanding exponentially so the prospects for the company were great, I said that since the price per bit of storage was falling exponentially the prospects were not so good and that the fair value of the EMC stock was $10 to $15 rather than the $50 or so it was then trading at. I made money on that short. Today EMC closed at $13.40 with a trading range over the last 52 weeks of $9.44 to $14.89. I wish all of my market predictions were that accurate.
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Hard drive bottleneck
CPU cycle: memory fetch time: hard drive retrieval time: human response time.
Although people make a big deal out of faster CPUs, most everyday computer operations are bottlenecked by the speed of the hard drive. Hard drive speeds have been increasing in rough correspondence to Moore's Law, but they receive much less publicity.
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Like DVD-Rs they are slow to write compared to thier read time. THey cannot be re-written yet. The drives are hugely expensive.
OTOH, they are only really production prototypes (ready for use commercially, but not for full production) and so are not in full-scale production, which means that the price is likely to fall, especially if one of the majors buys out one of the companies.
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As for alternatives to magnetic data storage; don't expect any soon. There's too much invested in mag mats and the closest alternative we had, MRAM, has turned out to be a complete waste of research and a massive drain of money.
When it comes to 'data' though, we're not talking about hard drives; pretty much everything important is still backed up with tape reels, and you can make that stuff for next to nothing in vast quantities.
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Hello McFly?
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history anyone?
Also, note that clear space draws clutter. And much of the clutter can be cleaned when the space is needed for more useful things. This is true in both the physical world and the digital one.
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Re: dorpus
I would tend to agree with this, but it really only holds for the first time data is retrieved. After your program (Warcraft, Word, whatever) loads in RAM, your hard drive speed becomes a non-factor. In the most intensive computing environment, video gaming, it also depends on the smartness of the program. If your game knows it will need to load a texture ahead of time and fetches it, it won't interrupt your game play. But if it waits until the instant the texture needs to be drawn to fetch it, you will see the delay while the drive references the texture file.
"Hard drive speeds have been increasing in rough correspondence to Moore's Law, but they receive much less publicity."
This I can't agree with. 10 years ago my desktop computer had a 5400RPM hard drive and could transfer at 100MB/sec. Today my desktop hard drive runs at 7200RPM and can transfer at 150MB/sec. A multi-thousand dollar Ultra320 SCSI drive can transfer at 320MB/sec.
So even comparing top of the line today, with standard desktops of 10 years ago, that's definitely not doubling every 24 months. Someone please correct me if my speeds are wrong :)
So while, yes, drives are slow, I don't foresee them getting much faster until mass solid-state storage becomes the norm. Until then, manufacturers and programmers need to start making more intelligent use of existing hard drive technology.
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Uh...
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Kryptonians
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two cents worth
It is up to the people to stand up on their own education to seek the truth and the facts and form their own opinion on these matters instead of becoming a mindless data storage bin for the News Media that sells its own agenda.
As for IDC, sounds like they are getting ready to effect an agenda of their own by supporting someone’s desire to market a mass storage device so they have to create a market need.
But what do I know…
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A.
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What?!
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Uh
Never heard of synthetic oil, have you?
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good
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response to paul
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What
If demand for oil grows faster than the rate at which oil can be found and extracted, then hello Houston we've got a problem.
Similarly, if demand for data storage space grows faster than the rate at which we can manuafacture new storage space, then hello Houston we've got a problem.
Right now it looks as if demand growth rate in both domains is outstripping production growth rates. But then again, as Albert Einstein was fond of commenting about regarding compound interest and human stupidity ....
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Re: What
Find the sources of those two quotes and I'll buy you a dozen hard drives. "Fond of commenting" is, at best, misleading. You seem to like pointing out fallacies in argument on your website, but you're pretty quick to use "quotes" that have nothing more than urban legend status as your clincher (a clincher that didn't make sense by the way).
Please support your use of the word "delusional." Again, you criticized posts on this very website for name calling, but that's all you've done. And while I'm at it I may as well mention that there is no substance to your comment at all, aside from unsupported speculation supporting the speculation of a future demand and supply crisis for storage.
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I dont get this...
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