Seeing first TB external drive for under $400, how long for inexpensive petabyte drives?customer adventures, search engines — by TDavid @ 1:02 pm PST
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It finally happened yesterday at our local Best Buy.
I’ve been tracking the prices of TB external drives for awhile wondering when we’d see them under $500 and available to walk in and buy. I predicted in 2004 that by the end of 2005 we’d see sub $500 TB drives in stores and was off by a year. For awhile the biggest drives you saw were 500 GB, then there was a relatively brief period of 750 GB drives but now 1 TB drives are readily available. Yesterday, I saw a couple different 1TB external drives and one of them was priced at $329 USD.
Or so I thought.
When I went to the Best Buy website today the price was $399, so it might have been my eyes. Still, $399, $329, it’s getting to be in the price range where more and more people will have 1TB+ drives. That means much more space to record, keep and index. Google’s focus on search and our reliance on being able to find will become even more important.
The last external drive I bought and attached to our network was 250GB. I partitioned that to share with iTunes (the Mac) and Zune (Windows) our MP3 library. The CDs we listen to regularly are stored on that drive so we can access from any machine on the network including the Xbox. We also use that as a network backup drive and I’ve copied over every AVI and MPG file for the Hmmcasts since the beginning of the year.
How much space is left on the 250 GB drive as of this writing? 101 GB.
Before too long we’re going to be thinking about another external drive to add to the network. No more sub 1TB hard drive purchases seem likely for our desktop machines unless the deals on sub 1 TB drives are incredible. I wonder if by the end of the year we’ll see 1 TB external drives going for under $200? It’s not that far away considering they’re already here for under $400.
I wouldn’t be shocked if within my lifetime exabyte storage is widely available for under $100. That means I’m expecting to see the smaller petabyte drives for under $100 in the next 10-20 years. Before you think I’m bonkers, petabyte drives aren’t really that far away if we’re already seeing TB drives already.
1024 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB)
1024 GB = 1 terabyte (TB)
1024 TB = 1 petabyte (PB)
1024 PB = 1 exabyte (EB)
1024 EB = 1 zettabyte (ZB)
It’s more doubtful I’ll live to see sub $100 zettabyte drives in local retailers, but I’m sure my children or future grandchilden will. Maybe one or more of them will be writing here at MakeYouGoHmm.com about walking around with a 1 ZB device recording their entire lives. Every exchange, every moment, every memory. Will Google or a Google competitor be there to index it all for eternity? Perhaps.
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I don’t know, TD — the way the technology curve is climbing we might have to find out what names come next. My first personal computer that had a hard drive was a DEC Rainbow with a 10MB drive. That’s 1/100,000th of a terabyte, just over 20 years ago. In another 20 years at the same rate of increase you’d be nearing the exabyte level, and with tech acceleration I would not be surprised at all to see zettabytes in use within that time frame.
What’s amazing to me is how cost reductions have enabled this. It seems like only yesterday we were marveling at $1 per megabyte (sometime in the mid-90’s), and now $1 gets you 2.5 gigabytes. That’s a 2500:1 cost reduction in about a decade.
Comment by Sterling Camden — June 4, 2007 @ 2:47 pm PST
Good points, Sterling. I don’t know what comes after zettabytes, do you? I’m excited about the prospect of no moving parts though.
Comment by TDavid — June 4, 2007 @ 2:49 pm PST
Looks like yottabytes comes next — after that, who knows? With zetta and yotta I spot a trend towards the Greek alphabet, with each decimal place getting a new letter (thus using every third for the next thousand-multiplier), so maybe what would follow yottabytes would be mubytes, then omikronbytes, then sigmabytes, then phibytes, then omegabytes, and then we have to find another alphabet.
Comment by Sterling Camden — June 4, 2007 @ 3:01 pm PST
I would rather see the compression get better than the hard drives get bigger. 1 TB is really neat, but if you are going to store that much digital content, my advice is to stick with a 1 TB bundle that uses RAID to protect your content, in case one of the drives goes bad. I’ve probably purchased 8 external hard drives over the last 3 - 4 years and at this point, all but two have gone bad. Most of the failures were under warranty, but the data that I would have lost, had I not been backing it up, would have cost me a lot more than the drives themselves.
Comment by davis freeberg — June 4, 2007 @ 3:57 pm PST
Methinks Googolbyte
And, as for the affordable petabyte… How about Amazon S3 (or some online variant)?
Comment by Gerald Buckley — June 5, 2007 @ 2:03 pm PST
Davis - yeah, don’t want to rely too much on one hard drive for anything any more.
Good one, Gerald, googolbyte is 100 zeroes isn’t it? Might have a way to go to that but then again, who knows. Hope all is going well with you, just added your blog to my Mac blogroll. I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile. Seeing you here reminded me. Thanks for stopping by
Comment by TDavid — June 5, 2007 @ 3:01 pm PST
Thanks man! BTW, how’s wife’s recovery? All well on that front? All the best!
Comment by Gerald Buckley — June 5, 2007 @ 6:05 pm PST