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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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I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know
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(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:33AM
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
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
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
I hate pausing for "...buffering..." ;-O
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16 2014, @03:50AM
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
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
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.