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posted by n1 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the big-data-would-know dept.

Over the decades the race between size of data files and hard drives has been a steadily decreasing margin. I well remember my first HD, 200 megabytes, which was enough to store 250 Amiga floppy disks. Over the years processors and I/O throughput have increased to the point where Video is now the dominant type of file, such that my pc has multiple 2TB drives and I have to manage my storage carefully. Long gone is the casual ability to back up on floppies, then CD's, then DVD's and even BluRay's are now impractical. Putting aside backups, when are we going to get the next paradigm shifting technology in storage? This article suggests things do not look good.

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  • (Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:33AM

    by Appalbarry (66) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:33AM (#32115) Journal

    Ohmygodyes! All storage will move to the cloud!

    Well, until the first time when you need a document and realize that your Internet connection is out....

    • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:14AM

      by davester666 (155) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:14AM (#32133)

      porn collections expand to fill all available storage...not that I would know...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:38AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:38AM (#32140)

        Who the hell still *downloads* that stuff?

        What could you possibly want that isn't available free and legal from the various video sites?

        • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:15AM

          by davester666 (155) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:15AM (#32159)

          I hate pausing for "...buffering..." ;-O

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:50AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:50AM (#32166)

          What sort of barbarian are you that you can watch that garbage? Anything less than 1080p porn is worthless.

    • (Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday April 16 2014, @10:53AM

      by Rivenaleem (3400) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @10:53AM (#32244)

      They day I run out of space to store a 'document' on a hard drive, is the day I quit using a computer and go back to hard copies.

      This need to store all your movies in super high quality rips on your media on the off-chance you might watch it again some time, is a bit obsessive.

      I regularly cull my hard drives of movies I haven't re-watched, to make space for movies I've not seen at all yet. If that movie happens to be in Netflix's catalogue, all the better. But if after a year I've felt no inclination to re-watch something, then it goes. The same happens with Steam games. If I have cleared it, and I still have a lengthy back catalog of un-played games, it gets uninstalled.

      Documents are the least of our worries, you can still save millions of them on a single hard drive.

      The middle-ground would be high-res photos that you took yourself, they are not something you can easily recover like a movie that's a torrent online. We shouldn't be using movie file sizes as the standard, as typically they are so bloated, different RIPs of varying quality, done from different sources and duplicated over and over across the net. If the movie was stored 4-5 times across reliable servers and streamed to anyone who wanted it on demand, then it would take up very little space in the grand scheme of things.

      What you need to use as your measure is unique files, like personal photos and documents you need kept local, and then space for software programs that must be run locally. I have 3 drives, a 256GB SSD, for my OS and games with High-res textures, a 1.4TB RAID0 for everything else and a 4TB external for Movies/TV and Music that I watch, keep for a while, then delete.

      People keeping large archives of blu-ray rips are not as common as you think.

      • (Score: 2) by hybristic on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:38PM

        by hybristic (10) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:38PM (#32404) Journal

        I used to do the same thing. Because I only had a laptop for years, I had to have a few external HDD's, they were each 250-500 GB because they weren't cheap and I had no job/worked part time. Eventually I reached a point where I would have to evaluate what I didn't want anymore because I needed to make room for new stuff, and I was okay with that. I would figure out what I hadn't watched in a while and just get rid of it. A few things changed my mind, and now I try to keep as much as I can.

        The first instance that lead me to start doing this was when I first moved out with roommates, and we were all slackers working part time making minimum wage. Well one day we couldn't pay for cable or internet, which put us in a situation that meant we couldn't reactivate the service because it was way too much. Well it took us about 3 weeks to watch all the TV shows and movies I had. I would steal internet at night and queue up a few downloads that would sometimes take days for one movie. We lived that way for 6 months until our lease was up and I was able to get out of there. The one saving grace was I was in school, so I would hang out there as long as possible before going home. It was horrible. We watched everything I owned (including physical dvds) at least 10 times.

        The next thing was when I moved out of that situation. I had started to collect a good dvd collection due to saving money on internet and cable. Well when I was moving, someone walked up and took the dvd's right out of my car. To this day the only dvd's I own is Stargate SG-1 and Jurassic Park, and then about 5 BluRays. I have recollected nearly all of my dvds through downloads, as I refuse to spend all that money on shit I already bought.

        Then there was the numerous things I have purchased through different media distributers, like PSN or iTunes. I lost access to a gmail account and boom, all of my purchases are gone and I cant get them back. So now I simply buy something, download a copy just in case. On top of that, I can get 1TB for like $60, so the cost to keep that much data is pretty cheap. My motivation is that I have been without access to reacquire things when I want them. I agree with the idea that you could simply go get the torrent again, but thats not always the case. There have been many points in my life were my connection to the internet has been inconsistent, and when I am connected its not nearly capable of getting me what I want, even in low quality. Further, there have been obscure movies that I have gotten that I have lost and when I go to torrent them again they have 1 seeder. I am a guy that loves to watch movies and TV shows, so I like to maintain a collection. I used to do it with VHS's and DVD's when I was younger, and now I do it with hard drives.

  • (Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:35AM

    by Horse With Stripes (577) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:35AM (#32117)

    There's not much meat in the article, and it seems to me that measuring HD capacity using a logarithm of kilobytes (1000 bytes) per liter is, shall we say, different.

    The traditional hard drive is slowly going away and the alternate size & form factor SSDs are going to be the dominant type of storage by 2020 (the year TFA's author says we should have been looking at 600TB drives based on his 'per liter' graph). Some laptops (Apple's I believe, and possibly others) don't even use SSDs as much as actually having non-serviceable storage soldered to the board.

    As nonvolatile memory sizes shrink, and the reliability of consumer priced SSDs (and their ilk) improve, we'll get closer to that (magic?) number of 600TB "drives".

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 16 2014, @12:46PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday April 16 2014, @12:46PM (#32279) Homepage
      Would you object to a graph of (data storage capacity per 19" rack 1U shelf) over time with a logarithmic y axis? You surely can't object to the logarithmic y axis, otherwise, there will be no signal before about 2000. You can't object to inclusion of a per-unit-volume property, as otherwise what you're measuring becomes intangible and undefinable.

      The only difference between that and what he's done is the textual labelling of the y axis (which absorbs the volume scale factor change too obviously). If the graph had been produced by an arabic-user not using arabic numerals, would you have been unable to see what the graph was telling you?

      I don't actually see what your objection is.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:12PM

        by Horse With Stripes (577) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:12PM (#32311)

        I don't actually see what your objection is.

        My objection is to 'liter'. We do not measure digital storage in 'liters'. We can measure it in many ways, but measuring it in terms that have nothing to do with the industry or the application of the technology seems unnecessary.

        Q: How big is your hard drive?
        A: I just upgraded to two liters.
        Q: How many documents will that hold?
        A: Almost a handful of sand worth.

        • (Score: 2) by egcagrac0 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:39PM

          by egcagrac0 (2705) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:39PM (#32320)

          KB/l is a perfectly valid way of discussing data storage density.

          It's fundamental to calculating the bandwidth of a station wagon [wikipedia.org].

        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:24PM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:24PM (#32334) Homepage
          > We do not measure digital storage in 'liters'.

          Neither did he. He used it in data capacity *per* litre. (So the information dimension was 1 rather than your 0, and the length dimension was -3 rather than your +3.)

          My current job is in the field that involves petascale storage. The dimensions he was using (info/volume) made *perfect* sense to me (although I'm also interested in info/power, info/dollar, and other efficiencies, obviously, as well as performance). I'd prefer he measured it per-U, because that tells me he's considering how I will expect to find the devices in use (spaced out in a rack, cooled), but that's just a constant scaling factor, not a different dimensionality.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:19PM

        by Blackmoore (57) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:19PM (#32313) Journal
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:39AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:39AM (#32120) Homepage Journal

    See, here's the thing. You can fit three or four ~24 episode seasons of a television show on a single BluRay disk. If you're to the point that they're too expensive a solution, that's not the available solutions' problem, that's you.

    Since the invention of hard drives, disks have not been meant to be able to back up everything you have on one or two of them. They're generally meant to back up one specific thing or group of things. They are absolutely not meant to back up every season of every TV show you've ever watched plus every movie you've ever seen. Ponder a bit and I think you'll find you do not in fact need to back up your Joanie Loves Chachi collection.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 1) by slartibartfastatp on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:04AM

      by slartibartfastatp (588) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:04AM (#32155) Journal

      Optical media in general is unpratical. Takes too long to record, too big (compare it to a microsd), easily scratches and have what, 5 years of life?

      • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:18AM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:18AM (#32176) Journal

        Actually I have DVD backups going back over a decade, they play just fine. as for backups, I thought that was what USB HDDs are for? I use DVDs for backing up video and software, the USB HDD for disc images and my music collection. As for SSDs replacing HDDs? until they come up with a version of SMART that will give you ample warning when that SSD is getting ready to shit itself I just don't see it happening, not to mention with all these cheap HD cameras and camcorders if anything my customers space needs are growing MUCH faster than the price of SSDs are lowering.

        I think personally that sizes have slowed down because the HDD OEMs have seen there is a "sweet spot" where a good 90% of their sales lie and that is in the sub $100 market and ATM it just isn't economical to build anything over 2TB at the sub $100 price point yet.

        --
        ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
        • (Score: 1) by tirefire on Wednesday April 16 2014, @06:52AM

          by tirefire (3414) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @06:52AM (#32206)

          Actually I have DVD backups going back over a decade, they play just fine.

          Help me out, brother. I have a few dozen DVD-Rs that I burned in 2005, all of them "RiDATA" brand. They all verified fine right after I burned them, but about 20% of them are coasters now. They are not scratched and they were always stored properly. Did I just pick a terrible brand for DVD media or what? Interested in your thoughts on this; if I recall correctly from your posts on Slashdot, you build and service PCs as a business.

          As for SSDs replacing HDDs? until they come up with a version of SMART that will give you ample warning when that SSD is getting ready to shit itself I just don't see it happening ...

          Amen to that. Modern laptops that use only flash memory for storage to save power/weight/space make me uneasy. They remind me of 1995-1999 Mitsubishi Eclipses and Eagle Talons; small, lightweight, fast and prone to sudden catastrophic failure. Google image search "crank walk" to see what I mean :P

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:47AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:47AM (#32217)

            Looks like they couldn't even spell RIP DATA properly ;).

            I used to use CD-Rs and DVD+Rs but nowadays I just copy data from HDD to HDD and USB flash drives.

          • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 16 2014, @10:56AM

            by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday April 16 2014, @10:56AM (#32246) Journal

            Sure thing, old Hairy is here to help, year working in the shop has given me experience in such matters and I'm glad to help. The thing you have to remember about discs is this.....different discs have different uses. I use Ridata.....for burning movies, NOT for data backup. For burning movies? GREAT, most won't keep a burned movie more than a year or two at most and they are cheap, its a perfect fit.

            Now on the other hand if I'm burning something for long term archiving? I follow some simple rules, 1.- Always keep the DVDs in a cool dry place, light kills the dye. A cabinet or on a shelf in the closet? PERFECT. 2.- Don't burn faster than 8x, it may just be me but I've found discs burnt at high speed just don't last like those burned at low speed and really, would it kill ya to wait an extra 5 minutes? 3.- ALWAYS use good discs, Verbatim or Memorex or Taiyo Yuden. Keep the cheap shit for movies and short term storage, and AVOID ever EVER buying "store brands" like Best Buy and Staples, they are garbage. 4.- Test a random discs from the batch every 12-18 months, even the best manufacturers can get a bad batch and have the dye just not set well, a random sample will give you warning if a bad batch is in your backup archive and give you time to remove and/or re-rip and re-burn. And don't feel bad if it happens to you, not 6 months ago I have to sort through a dozen discs in my backup archive and see what was worth as reburn as I found a failing discs. LiLo was a big brand around 2005 (no longer sold, this is probably why) and the dye had started breaking down, but by testing a sample I caught the issue and was able to save the data I wanted.

            Follow these rules and you too can have discs age gracefully instead of turning into shit.

            --
            ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
            • (Score: 1) by DrMag on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:00PM

              by DrMag (1860) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:00PM (#32282)

              Another option, if you're determined to use optical discs, is to switch to M-Discs [mdisc.com]. Not every drive can burn to these, of course, but fortunately compatible drives don't cost any more than non-compatible drives. The discs themselves cost more, though.

              My current computer build I nearly chose to not put an optical drive in, as it has so far only been used to install the OS on it (Windows 7 on that machine, as it was built specifically to play certain games), so I'm of the persuasion that these are on their way out, but if you need optical drive storage that is archival quality, this seems a reasonable choice.

              • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:22PM

                by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:22PM (#32420) Journal

                I'm sorry but at $3 a pop they simply aren't practical. Using my system I've gotten over 10 years of storage, average cost per 100? $24 or 24c a disc. And really what is so hard about my system? You pick a random disc from the stack every 12 to 18 months, even with as many discs as I have that takes an hours or so, and you keep them out of the light....its REALLY not hard.

                Following the simple steps I laid out I have backups of software and videos going back to 2002 that read as good as they day I burned them and I've had to replace MAYBE 20 discs in that 12+ years....considering the price paid for the medium that is a pretty damned good ratio I think.

                --
                ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
                • (Score: 1) by tirefire on Friday April 18 2014, @02:36AM

                  by tirefire (3414) on Friday April 18 2014, @02:36AM (#32932)

                  Thanks DrMag for introducing me to M-Disks, I had no idea recordable media like that existed. I might look into that again if I ever want to burn a disk with really important data for posterity like wedding pictures or something.

                  And Hairy - yeah I'll probably switch to the brands you recommended, or maybe I'll just burn redundant disks with crappy media (if it's cheaper). Although now that I think of it, I've only burned a handful of DVDs ever since I bought a barely-used 1TB 5400 RPM WD Green drive from a friend of mine who hated it because the seek times sucked and she didn't feel like figuring out how to make the 4k sectoring work with her WinXP system.

                  • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday April 18 2014, @04:26AM

                    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday April 18 2014, @04:26AM (#32968) Journal

                    Actually if you'll do your DVD shopping at newegg (I'd recommend getting the email flyer, they will often have sales that are only listed in the flyer) you can get the memorex and verbatim DVDs at $22 or less a 100 pack, so why bother with the ultra cheap shit when you are only saving maybe $5 a 100 pack?

                    Again the cheap discs have their purpose, they make great DVD backups, since most of the time nobody is gonna care about a burnt DVD more than a year or two and for big backups like disc images? I agree, I have a WD 1TB external that I make monthly differential backups of my system on and for that its great. But at the end of the day it really comes down to figuring out what to keep and what to toss, in my case I'll toss your "everyday" software like your browsers, cleaners, etc because it will always have a newer version out, while I keep the drivers I download as you never know when some website is gonna go down and make it damned hard to find a driver.

                    --
                    ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
    • (Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:10PM

      by mojo chan (266) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:10PM (#32287)

      You can fit three or four ~24 episode seasons of a television show on a single BluRay disk

      Only in standard definition though. I hate watching anything except really old shows* in standard def now, 720p being the minimum I would require. That's why we will keep needing bigger and bigger disks for the foreseeable future.

      * and porn. High def porn was a bad idea.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:55PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:55PM (#32301)

      Since the invention of hard drives, [optical] disks have not been meant to be able to back up everything you have on one or two of them.

      Wrong. Hard drives long predate optical disks for consumer use. The first CD-ROMs came out in the early 90s, and CD-Rs not long after. When CD-Rs were brand-new, almost no one had a hard drive that could store 650MB of data. In fact, CD-R burners were insanely expensive because they came with hard drives large enough to hold an entire CD-R image, as computers of that time weren't fast enough to stream data to the CD-R burner without experiencing buffer underruns. It was entirely common for computers with CD-ROM drives to have hard drives smaller than the CD-ROM capacity, and it took a while before it was normal for people to have hard drives significantly larger than 650MB.

      Of course, when CD-Rs were new, they weren't used for backup at all; they were just too expensive. People used floppy drives or QIC tape drives for that. This is a time when 80MB was considered a decent amount of space, and 200MB was plenty.

  • (Score: 2) by Kell on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:39AM

    by Kell (292) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:39AM (#32121)

    I think the question is founded on a faulty premise. Anyone who lived through 80s and 90s computing will remember what it was like to have strictly limited storage space. Although the files today are larger, the size of harddrives has grown magnificently - to the point that we are only once again even thinking about the limits of storage available. Perhaps we are exiting a transient golden age of storage, but if so we must see it as just that - transient. Perhaps a new technology will come along and we will once again live in a time of plentiful drive space, or perhaps we will just have to relearn the old habits of thinking carefully about what files we store. Odds are good that many of the files you horde (especially videos) will be accessed once and then never again...

    --
    Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
    • (Score: 2) by TheLink on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:18AM

      by TheLink (332) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:18AM (#32220) Journal
      IO bandwidth and latency has become more and more of an issue than storage capacity.

      Not so useful having 600TB of storage but only a transfer rate of 100MB/sec. Will take you 72 days to copy 600TB at that rate.

      SSDs are fast and help but they cost more per TB. And yes I do run out of space on my SSDs - add a VM or two and it starts to become kind of cramped.

      In theory I could use my SSD as a cache for large spinning platter HDDs, but I'm going to let the "consumer priced" technology improve and mature a bit first. So far I don't see many benchmarks of them either.

      If you record a lot of video those TBs start getting used up quite quickly too unless you compress them.
  • (Score: 1) by Hell_Rok on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:43AM

    by Hell_Rok (2527) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:43AM (#32123) Homepage

    Here's my question. How much of that data is "I can't live without", how much is "I created this content, it doesn't exist elsewhere", and how much is "But I might watch it again some day!"

    If you are a photographer or video editor, you're definitely going to have lots and lots of data. Backing up all that data is just a cost of doing business. I mean, a 2TB external hard drive is about AUD$130. Is that really so crazy to expect you to buy to backup your stuff?

    • (Score: 1) by linsane on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:46AM

      by linsane (633) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:46AM (#32197)

      Also 'big data' != 'large data'

    • (Score: 2) by emg on Wednesday April 16 2014, @06:01PM

      by emg (3464) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @06:01PM (#32393)

      "I mean, a 2TB external hard drive is about AUD$130. Is that really so crazy to expect you to buy to backup your stuff?"

      You're going to trust footage you actually make money from to a $130 USB drive?

      That's probably OK for a wedding video where no-one will ever touch the footage again, but if you spent $100,000 shooting the footage, you're not going to balk at building a big RAID server to store it.

      • (Score: 1) by Hell_Rok on Wednesday April 16 2014, @11:29PM

        by Hell_Rok (2527) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @11:29PM (#32459) Homepage

        I was under the assumption that this was the hobbyist user we were discussing since they talked about backing up to DVD's instead of tapes.

  • (Score: 1) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:05AM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:05AM (#32129) Journal

    Whenever I buy a new computer or wipe the drive for any reason, I just dd or cp (depending how full it is and what I'm doing with it) onto external media. And then leave it there. Forever. This winter I did go through and clean some of those up, remove some duplicates, but I've still got a couple full clones I haven't sorted through. In fact, I have clones of clones in cases where I backed up one laptop onto another, left that there, then backed that one up onto external media! Yeah, I'm a bit disorganized...

    The largest disk I own is 2TB, for a massive collection of movies, TV shows, and downloaded YouTube videos. Then I have a 1.5TB that I use for backups of really important files and these periodic system clones. And that's the only external storage I use.

    It's been the exact opposite of this article in my experience -- every year I somehow wind up with more and more unused space on my drives. Most of my external drives were formerly internal drives, and my internal drives which used to always be just shy of 100% utilized now never break 50%

    And now I just bought a new laptop with 1.25TB of disk space...when .25TB would probably be enough, all my movies and such download direct to the media center. So why the extra terabyte? Well...why not, storage is cheap and I hope to keep this new one for a LONG time. Maybe in three or four years I'll find a use for it... :)

    Seriously though, how the hell do you fill up multiple 2TB drives? What are you doing, streaming raw uncompressed HD video direct to disk all day long??

    • (Score: 1) by opinionated_science on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:11PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:11PM (#32288)

      2TB is massive collection of movies?

      Perhaps we need a new unit of "Lifetimes of movies worth watching". I suspect, that depending on the movies, 10TB will not even get to 0.001. That's some compression though....

      • (Score: 1) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:24PM

        by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:24PM (#32403) Journal

        Well, that's everything I've watched for the past two years (along with quite a bit that I haven't yet), and I pretty much have something playing almost all the time while I'm home...so yeah, I'd call that a pretty large collection.

        Probably 50%, if not more, is from YouTube though. A lot of older stuff too. Monochrome sci-fi classics compress pretty well. Only a couple of the movies are full HD. Quick math with a lot of guesswork (I'm currently at the office) puts it around 6000+ hours of video, if the drive was full. Still got a bit of free space though I think.

  • (Score: 2, Funny) by dast on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:16AM

    by dast (1633) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:16AM (#32134)

    Your first hard drive was 200 MB? Damn I am getting old.

    • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:49AM

      by isostatic (365) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:49AM (#32148) Journal

      Your first hard drive was 200 MB? Damn I am getting old.

      He got his first hard drive a decade before Winchesters came out, and you think that's a newbie? Man you ARE old, mid-seventies at least?

      Also in 1961, Bryant Computer Products introduced its 4000 series disk drives. These massive units stood 52 inches (1.3 m) tall, 70 inches (1.8 m) wide, and had up to 26 platters, each 39 inches (0.99 m) in diameter, rotating at up to 1,200 rpm. Access times were from 50 to 205 milliseconds (ms). The drive's total capacity, depending on the number of platters installed, was up to 205,377,600 bytes (205 MB). ....
      In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 "Winchester" disk drive, the first significant commercial use of low mass and low load heads with lubricated platters

      • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:01AM

        by evilviper (1760) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:01AM (#32207) Homepage Journal

        He got his first hard drive a decade before Winchesters came out, and you think that's a newbie?

        I think it's fair to assume when someone says "my first..." they're talking about consumer products. At least I don't generally refer to equipment I maintain at work as "mine".

        --
        Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 16 2014, @12:39PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 16 2014, @12:39PM (#32277)

        That's pretty fast. My first hard drive was a 20 meg "hard card" where the 3.5 was stuck at the end of an ISA slot (full length if I recall). This was long before voicecoil replaced steppers in the cheap consumer drives, so a genuine stepper motor (like in a floppy) growled to 250 ms or whatever access speeds. It was, of course, much faster than locating and inserting 360K 5.25 floppy disks so I was happy.

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:58PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:58PM (#32303)

        No one person ever owned a 205MB hard drive in the 1960s. Corporations did, but contrary to what politicians and morons would have you believe, corporations are not people.

    • (Score: 1) by black6host on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:54AM

      by black6host (3827) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:54AM (#32150) Journal

      I as well. My first was 5MB. Purchased out of necessity as I ran a fairly popular BBS way back when. Kept upgrading, mainly due to the BBS, as larger drives came out at an affordable price point. That and modems. Damn that 1200bps modem was fast compared to the 300 baud I started with! :)

      The things we take for granted today were unthinkable, by many I'd bet, way back then. It's nice though, to reflect upon how far we've come, especially given I've been walking this technology road for a very long time. I appreciated the hell out of that 5MB hard drive...

    • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:07AM

      by Dunbal (3515) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:07AM (#32171)

      Yeah, mine was 10MB and cost about $500.

      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:45AM

        by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @07:45AM (#32216) Journal

        Mine was 20, but what a sweet 20 it was. You never forget your first harddrive, or it's name. Myrna, that was the name of the 20Mb hard drive in my first computer, it ran at twice the clock speed of others (though I don't remember what that was? Instead of 4.77 Mhz, it was 8? Wow, speed!) Now mind you, I am talking about an AntiKytheria, which with we used to calculate the position of the stars back in the 200's BC. Or am I slipping into my username again. Or did I dream it?

        Point is, you geeks, that Peak Storage does not mean what the submitter thinks it means, and he or she should stop using it. Peak means we will never have as much storage in the future, when in fact it looks to be that the clouds are infinite! (REPEAT marketing leveraging of mindless terms after me!) Or it is the case the our storage has surpassed the finite forms of backup of our storage, which is definitely not Peak Storage, or any other kind of tipping point, and do not make me come back here to correct such nonsense again. Am I in the right forum? Bueller? Ptolemy Claudius?

        • (Score: 2) by Dunbal on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:20PM

          by Dunbal (3515) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:20PM (#32291)

          To be honest no one reads the articles and very few read the summaries. It's just an excuse for a nostalgic trip down memory lane. MMMMM EGA is coming out in a few years, 16 whole colors...

    • (Score: 1) by bill_mcgonigle on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:21AM

      by bill_mcgonigle (1105) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:21AM (#32187)

      Your first hard drive was 200 MB? Damn I am getting old.

      I have to admit, the first drive I bought with my own money was a 330MB ESDI - that was $700 worth of paper route money (I was doing about 20 hours a week delivering papers to support my habit). It got me all the way through to when I ditched DOS and moved over to Linux (c. '94') so that was money well spent.

      But ... today I can buy 12TB of RAID'ed drive storage for $700. 'Peak storage' is nonsense - it's never been more plentiful or cheaper. Seagate has even talked about how they didn't need to go to their next generation tech for this year's crop of drives because they could push their existing technology further than they expected.

      Oh, and since I'm counting RAID here maybe I should have included the $120 it cost me to add a QIC-80 tape drive to back up the ESDI drive and then a pile of tapes, since both are to guard against single drive failures. So like 16TB of online storage for the same money and we haven't even talked about inflation (gasoline was 83 cents per gallon at the time). Dollar-for-dollar, we've moved up to double-redundancy RAID and 24TB of storage, and only that much because the onboard SATA connectors are all full.

      Cry me a river.

    • (Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:31AM

      by WizardFusion (498) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 16 2014, @08:31AM (#32221) Journal

      40mb for my first drive, and a 386sx processor

  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:39AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @02:39AM (#32141) Homepage Journal

    Even if hard drive sizes and cost stagnates for a decade, we'll be just fine...

    People storing their entire lives on a single massive hard drive is just an artifact of how incredibly cheap they are... When you're ripping your entire Blu-ray collection to your hard drive, just so you don't have to get off your couch to insert a disk, you simply have more cheap hard drive space than you know what to do with. Even if that changed, it wouldn't be the end of the world, just a slight bit less convenience or more expense. But disk swapping probably isn't in the cards, either.

    I don't envision a major new source of content in the near future. HDTV was looming for decades, and government mandates meant it WAS coming, no matter what. 4k TVs, and movies for them, though? Looks stillborn to me. And even if I'm wrong, the folks selling it are the ones who will have to come up with a media format to store them on, that they can easily sell you, like Blu-ray and DVDs before it.

    And while your hard drive may be filling up with 1080p videos, newer compression formats keep coming, too. MPEG-2 broadcasts get converted to H.264, and soon even H.264 could make way for H.265 or perhaps Google's VP9. Then the same amount of content fits in less space, even though your hard drive didn't get any bigger.

    Horror of horrors... some people might choose NOT to store the entire series of every TV show they've ever watch, in highdef on their computer! Tragic, I know, but I think the human race will be able to work through it.

    But more realistically, it seems like people PREFER to depend on the "cloud" for their multimedia storage. First it was cable, which people paid quite a bit of money for, even when they had VCRs that could easily record their favorite TV shows in the first-run, rather than watching them in syndication on 20 different channels... Then DVRs replaced the VCRs, and DVDs were cheap enough to buy entire series outright without a thought... Yet people STILL kept their incredibly expensive cable subscriptions. These days, it's more often $100/month broadband and $200/month cell phone bills, so you can stream the 20 songs you listen to, over and over again, from Pandora, and stream 4k movies to the 3" screen on your cell phone, while you're in Starbucks. If Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, et al., keep their prices low, many (most?) people will stop building local media collections in the first place, and just stream it, no matter what happens to the price and capacity of hard disk drives.

    Heck... If we really had a problem, we'd be seeing 5.25" "Bigfoot" hard drives once again. Since we aren't, I'm going to say there just isn't an overwhelming demand for lots more storage space than we have, currently.

    --
    Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
    • (Score: 1) by bill_mcgonigle on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:25AM

      by bill_mcgonigle (1105) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:25AM (#32188)

      And even if I'm wrong, the folks selling it are the ones who will have to come up with a media format to store them on

      So, obviously 4K will take more space than HD, but just a note - it doesn't scale linearly with area. Only the most obnoxious edge cases will fill all 4K with unique data - most of it is smooth gradients that can be easily compressed with the same codecs that work well today and obviously the newer codecs are optimizing a bit more for higher resolutions.

  • (Score: 1) by technopoptart on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:10AM

    by technopoptart (1746) <reversethis-{oc. ... ht} {ta} {semaj}> on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:10AM (#32156)

    i think this is overblown. You really don't need to archive everything. You don't need all that stuff, really how often do you use all the "media", and other junk we collect. We should organize, store offline, and not hoard.

      I grew up in the 1980's Atari cartridges, cassette tapes, commodore disks, and a 8088, running DOS 3. I know about 5.25 floppies. My first computer completely my own in high school was a Pentium 66 with a 500mb hard-drive. I filled that thing up with windows 3.11 and Linux. At times i only had 15 megs for my web browsing cache. Today we have forgotten or never experienced DISCIPLINE. A 250 gb ssd is fine for the vast majority of users and even many geeks.

    • (Score: 1) by pogostix on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:00AM

      by pogostix (1696) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:00AM (#32183)

      So you're saying 250gb ought to be enough for anybody? :P

  • (Score: 2) by Boxzy on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:30AM

    by Boxzy (742) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:30AM (#32179) Journal

    Just noticed my submission was accepted and posted almost immediately.

    Myself and my social group gave up live TV decades ago, opting for creating a local library of audio and video minus adverts initially on VHS and audiocassette, upgrading storage media over the last 30 odd years. So its not really a case of MY data, plus we each keep separate sections of our mutual library except for the most popular stuff where there is overlap. You can keep your Cloud. As it happens, the internet has opened up vistas of previously unattainable ancient video such as every movie by Alfred Hitchcock going back almost a hundred years, Scifi movies going back over a hundred years and a thousand other things to boot.

    The short-sightedness of you kids today baffles me, at every turn the powers that be keep trying to remove all freedom from the internet and turn it into a corporate walled garden, but you claim nobody needs local storage as we can stream everything! Sorry but its daft and flat wrong. All the TV and Movies and Documentaries and Audio I ever wanted to watch are on my hard drives and *I* control the off switch.

    --
    Go green, Go Soylent.
    • (Score: 1) by mrclisdue on Wednesday April 16 2014, @10:04AM

      by mrclisdue (680) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @10:04AM (#32234)

      The short-sightedness of you kids today baffles me, at every turn the powers that be keep trying to remove all freedom from the internet

      ...and yet today, versus 25+ years ago when I began my net experience, I can find/stream/download *everything* (including live telly) I need/want/'can imagine' with relative ease, speed, and *virtual* impunity. *They* are not interested in me. No hysteria, no paranoia.

      From my perspective, *despite* the sad efforts of the *IAA's, and various legislative efforts worldwide, we're so far ahead, the genie so far out of the bottle, it's impossible for any government- or corporate-contrived machine to claw it back.

      tl;dr
      I get more free stuff today on the 'nets than I did 25 years ago. You're claiming this is shrinking? Coz tomorrow, or today, in your time zone, I'll be getting even more... I'm not seeing your trend....

       

    • (Score: 1) by jon3k on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:06PM

      by jon3k (3718) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:06PM (#32285)

      Recording TV to VHS and removing commercials? What a colossal waste of time and energy. What were you recording? Television shows? Movies? You know you can just buy those, right? Was it really worth all the time and energy to save $9 on a VHS tape? That is the strangest thing I've ever heard.

      The whole "ditch TV" thing didn't make since until about 10 years ago when you could easily download or stream anything you wanted effortlessly. Anything before that is just weird.

      • (Score: 1) by len_harms on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:23PM

        by len_harms (1904) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:23PM (#32333) Journal

        Depends. Back in the early 90s they would sell you 1-2 shows for 30 bucks on a single VHS tape. OR you could buy 10 for 10 bucks and record them and take out the commercials. If you didnt care about quality you could get 6 shows per tape. Or pretty close to the whole run of star trek for 10 bucks. Or your way which would have been about 700-2500 depending on the cost and how much they packed on the tape. So it just depends on how much time you are willing to waste on it.

        You could buy a VCR that did most of the grunt work for you.

        'Ditch tv thing' is just a matter of cost. I knew 'rich folk' who had walls of VHS tapes they bought. They didnt have cable. It is more convenient now as the cost is way lower. I also knew people who had large drawers full of self tapped movies. The VCRs had timers on them. You pop a tape in the movie starts at 8:15 and runs until 10:30. Come by the next day rewind it to where the movie really ended, set it up for the next movie. I knew many people who never watched live tv. They just had the movie channels just to get movies. Its not 'new' it just changed a bit. People are now realizing they can get rid of one more part of the pay for movies puzzle, the cable bill.

    • (Score: 2) by lx on Thursday April 17 2014, @09:54AM

      by lx (1915) on Thursday April 17 2014, @09:54AM (#32561)

      I don't really get people equating internet freedom with the freedom to watch movies.

      • (Score: 2) by Boxzy on Thursday April 17 2014, @04:40PM

        by Boxzy (742) on Thursday April 17 2014, @04:40PM (#32729) Journal

        I, personally, equate internet freedom with the right to access humankinds historical cultural artifacts, going back over the last few hundred years.

        This includes Video, but it also includes the scanned pages of many old books of mine and my friends, (many specific fields serious works, encyclopedias in various fields, service manuals for ancient machinery and for example steam engines, diesel electric engines etc.)

        Then there are the archives of various Newspapers, Magazines, Public Domain publications Fact, Fiction and Government, 18th and 19th Century audio recordings, transcripts, sheet music..... lots and lots of the written and spoken word.

        Movies and TV series take up a lot of space, but you do yourself a disservice to claim that's all there is.

        This is about Human Culture.

        People like me want our history to be free, not subject to corporate revisionism and not Owned and priced up to the highest dollar value they can get away with.

        --
        Go green, Go Soylent.
  • (Score: 1) by Balderdash on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:26PM

    by Balderdash (693) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @04:26PM (#32363)

    Need more long-term storage?

    Tape. Tape. Tape.

    Tape.

    The answer is... tape.

    --
    I browse at -1. Free and open discourse requires consideration and review of all attempts at participation.
    • (Score: 2) by Boxzy on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:20PM

      by Boxzy (742) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:20PM (#32383) Journal

      The answer is NOT tape. The answer is Hard drives, or any other commodity product that can simply be plugged into another computer. Everyone had/has an optical drive, so those discs were convenient until they started looking too small. I've been pricing up Tape drives and they are thousands of dollars for one drive. If we each want to access the library we need one each? I can buy, today, 6 4TB Hard drives for ~$660 You go price up a tape drive to store 24TB and come tell me its cheaper than $660

      The answer is not tape.

      --
      Go green, Go Soylent.
      • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:40AM

        by isostatic (365) on Thursday April 17 2014, @12:40AM (#32467) Journal

        That 1.5GB tape will be more reliable than your hard drives.

        That said, it won't be more reliable than havine 3 copies on hard drives.

        However the thing that really turns me off of tape is the tape-fans always quote "compressed" storage. "LTO-6 is more than TWICE as good as LTO-5". Err no, LTO-5 is 1.5TB, LTO-6 is 2.5TB (after we expected 3TB).

        I couldn't give a stuff about compression because my files ARE ALREADY COMPRESSED.

    • (Score: 1) by Mesa Mike on Thursday April 17 2014, @02:35AM

      by Mesa Mike (2788) on Thursday April 17 2014, @02:35AM (#32499)

      ... a station wagon full of tapes, hurtling down the highway!

  • (Score: 2) by zim on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:01PM

    by zim (1251) on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:01PM (#32379)
    But i passed peak storage awhile ago.

    I had stacks and stacks of old media from cdr,dvd, ds-dvd, floppys, external drives, flash.

    ANNNNNND i noticed i never ever use 98% of them. Once its written and stored.
    There it is. It's going to sit forever collecting dust until i can't read it because that hardware doesn't even exist anymore.

    So i quit saving things that were EASY to get. And cut my storage to around 1tb total.

    If it's not a SSD or a 16+ gb flashdrive. It got thrown away. Thousands of gigs of stuff. Poof. Junk.
    And if i really feel the need for something i had once. It's out there on the net in dozens of places.

    It makes no sense to keep copies of things 'just to have them around' if i can replace them for a few dollars or even pirate them for free again.

    Of course this only works since the rest of you are hording mofos. So you shouldn't listen to me. Horde all that stuff. That's my backup copy. Thanks.
  • (Score: 2) by mrcoolbp on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:59PM

    by mrcoolbp (68) <mrcoolbp@soylentnews.org> on Wednesday April 16 2014, @05:59PM (#32391) Homepage

    And the answer is "no."

    --
    (Score:1^½, Radical)