Comments on: Seeing first TB external drive for under $400, how long for inexpensive petabyte drives?

By: Gerald Buckley

Gerald Buckley — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 01:05:05 +0000

Thanks man! BTW, how’s wife’s recovery? All well on that front? All the best!

By: TDavid

TDavid — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:01:31 +0000

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

By: Gerald Buckley

Gerald Buckley — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:03:54 +0000

Methinks Googolbyte

And, as for the affordable petabyte… How about Amazon S3 (or some online variant)?

By: davis freeberg

davis freeberg — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:57:03 +0000

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.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:01:57 +0000

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.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:49:33 +0000

Good points, Sterling. I don’t know what comes after zettabytes, do you? I’m excited about the prospect of no moving parts though.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:47:22 +0000

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.