Amazing... 1,500,000 GB hard drives in five years?

[Weltall]

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/5124/...harddrives

And it might cost a mere $750... can you dare to imagine? The technology seems sound, if he can pull it off.

[Dark Jaguar]

1.2 peta bytes?

[Weltall]

Yes.

On a beast like that you could store so many average-sized MP3 files that you wouldn't hear a song repeat itself until around June of 4146.

THAT is technology I NEED.

[Great Rumbler]

What would you put on such a harddrive?

[Undertow]

What would you put on such a harddrive?

<i>The internet</i>.

[Dark Jaguar]

Data.

[lazyfatbum]

With current internet speeds i dont see such a HDD being a realistic need. For an editor yes, or anyone knee deep in a graphics workstation, absolutely. But for consumers, no way. i have over 6000 mp3's, gigs upon gigs of full-length porn movies, entire CD rom games, tens of thousands of samples in CD quality audio etc etc and i'm no where near my limit of 150 gigs. In order for an HDD of that size to be needed for consumers, transfer speeds will need to increase 20 fold. To the point of d/l a few dozen gigs taking less than 20 minutes and even then, what would you be d/l? Porn, bootleg or online purchased HD films and full versions of video games; they're the only things (as far as average consumers go) that takes up gigs at a time.

When we have 600MB/sec d/l speeds people will start needing huge storage devices, but not now. It would be a stupid purchase with absolutely no purpose for the average consumer. An HD editor would probably fill it within the span of 5 or 6 films, animators and renderers at Pixar would do it to, everyone else would end up with a incredibly stupid device with no worth.

[Great Rumbler]

Data.

[Undertow]

*pic*

Okay, that was pretty funny.

[Dark Jaguar]

DATA NOOOOO!

Moving along, this guy seems just a little too optimistic. Consider some of his other projects and goals, specifically regarding "almost zero energy consumption".

Also, I have a feeling the uncertainty principle may take effect at such a small scale, or at least might need to be accounted for.

My prediction? Something like this may be possible, but not in the time frame this person is suggesting. We shall see though.

[EdenMaster]

With that kind of hard drive I could finally back-up my entire brain. Then, when (if?) I die, they can just build a robot and upload all the information. Boom! I'm back!

But why so short...

[Geno]

Yay, I could save my entire computer and never have to worry about losing anything the next time it needs to be formatted!

[Weltall]

I admit that sundch capacity would be limited for personal use (though the guy has a point... once upon a time, 1 GB hard drives were thought to be more than any person would ever need).

But for large businesses? For music and movie studios, who would be able to store literally months of uncompressed video and audio for every conceivable need? And of course, think of smaller-scales of this technology... 5TB MP3 players?

[Dark Jaguar]

A quadrillion bytes...

[lazyfatbum]

Even if the music is recorded at 24 bit DVDA you would need litteraly millions upon millions of songs to fill such a capacity, it's just rediculous.

[Dark Jaguar]

It's DECADENT! We can't allow this sort of, WILLY NILLY upgrading without any attention to MORAL issues, as lazy has brought up!

[Darunia]

What could you even need that much memory for... but, I guess they'll just keep making bigger, more all-consuming videogames, that eventually use jpeg-photo quality graphics running on smoother engines...

Man that sounds nice.

[Dark Jaguar]

You wouldn't, and that's what is so nice. Look at that brain of yours. To the best of my knowledge, no human has reached maximum memory capacity as of yet. Who knows what extending the human life span may end up doing though... I'd hate to think humans have some sort of "out of memory error". Then again, if we never lived that long, we may never have evolved a mechanism for handling such an occurance.

[Great Rumbler]

To the best of my knowledge, no human has reached maximum memory capacity as of yet.

They do all the time, it's called getting old and forgetting things that happened when you were younger...or that happened last year....

[Dark Jaguar]

How do you know that is the specific mechanism that causes that? First of all, this does not apply to all elderly. That alone calls your conclusion into doubt. Secondly, I had read in the past that the mechanism responsible was that in those who's memory becomes faulty, simply put the neural connections begin to break down and the ability to create new connections itself breaks down.

To assume anything further is just that: assuming.