A Terabyte on the Desktop

By | April 4, 2005
2 Comments

Kurzweil reports this encouraging development:

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce on Monday a record for storage density on a disk drive: 230 billion bits per square inch, which would make possible a desktop computer drive capable of storing a terabyte of information.

The technology is known as perpendicular recording because the tiny magnets that represent digits are placed upright, not end to end.

I remember when I was working for a computer magazine years ago getting to try out a hard disk with an almost unimaginable size of 300 megabytes. Imagine trying to get by on so little now.

I wonder how long it will be before a terabyte seems cramped?

More details here (link requires annoying registration).

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    It was about 1985 or so when my uncle became the first person I knew to even have a hard drive. It held 10 megabytes.

    I wondered how he could ever use all that space. I mean, the Bible is about 4 megabytes. How would he ever fill that much space with typing?

    Answer: he wouldn’t – the typed word was a small percentage of what he quickly filled that hard drive with. Today it’s a miniscule amount of what I fill my hard drives with.

    This, typing as a percentage of typical hard drive usage, would be an interesting technological indicator. I would bet there is an negative exponential curve here.

  • Jim Strickland

    How long until a terrabyte seems cramped: About a year after these drives hit the market when Microsoft gets another version of Office out. ;)