Dan Gillmor: Disk-drive capacity continues to grow
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist
The cost of disk-drive capacity has dropped below a buck a gigabyte. The
news was anticlimactic in a sense, because it was predictable in a time of
constant technological progress.
It was one of those milestones that still means something -- not just a
testament to the storage industry's achievements, but also a reminder of
how the seemingly most prosaic of information technologies may have turned
out to be the most disruptive.
Like others of my generation, I can remember my first computer with a hard
disk, which I bought in the mid-1980s after years of personal computing
with floppy disks and, before that, cassette storage. I wondered how I'd
ever fill the 10 megabytes on the IBM PC, given that an entire novel's
worth of text takes up less than 1 megabyte, or 1/60,000 of the space on
today's typical 60-gigabyte hard drive.
I soon found out. In a Digital Age corollary to Parkinson's Law, data
expanded to fit the available space.
I learned this repeatedly as the types of data changed. Text was efficient.
Graphics took up more space. Microsoft created file formats for its Office
software that took up even more.
Silicon Valley's disk-drive innovators kept pace. Then came multimedia,
especially MP3s, the music format that routinely uses a couple of megabytes
a song. My Apple iPod MP3 player will fill up one of these days.
But the iPod has a measly (!) 10 gigabytes. By this time next year we'll
see tiny media players with 40 or 60 gigabytes of storage.
Ah, but what about video? That's the ultimate space hog, right? Yes, for
now. My hard-disk video recorder at home has what today is a laughably
small capacity, 40 gigabytes, but it holds more than 30 hours of video I
record from the satellite, ensuring that there's usually something I want
to watch when I get home.
The kinds of files we store keep getting bulkier, but the disk-drive
wizards are moving fast enough to stay ahead. In the next few years, given
their continuing innovation, they're likely to do something I didn't
imagine possible until recently -- give us so much storage at such a low
cost that we genuinely don't know how to use it all.
But in the short term, disk space still will be somewhat constrained.
Here's one example of how we'll use it: I just installed the 2003
Encyclopedia Britannica on my laptop computer. It came on a DVD disk and
took up about 2.4 gigabytes of space. This is the same encyclopedia, with
multimedia additions, that used to take up a huge bookshelf. Now I carry it
around.
The immense storage capabilities of computer disk drives also make me
wonder whether applications we once assumed should reside on central
servers might migrate back down to the desktop. Corporations could install
employee Web sites on laptop computers, for example.
I'd also like to have a home server that stored everything -- music,
movies, reference materials, software, you name it -- for easy access by
devices I use around the house. Of course, I'd want a backup of everything.
But the huge capacities of drives for desktops and servers remind us of
another aspect of the industry's progress. Disk drives are getting smaller,
too. We'll soon embed huge amounts of storage into small devices.
Digital movie cameras are starting to be equipped with hard disks, a
natural step. Soon enough, though, all kinds of other things we use every
day will make a record of what they're doing. That will raise some new
questions. For example, what are the privacy implications of our
automobiles keeping track of where we drive and at what speed, as the car
makers, insurance industry and government snoops will surely wish?
In the medium term, we could fill up disks at the edge of networks in order
to help spread multimedia content to people who want to use it. This will
be necessary given the near-zero probability that the telecommunications
industry will give us sufficient bandwidth -- the speed of network data
connections -- for centralized multimedia delivery.
The furor over digital copying is a direct outgrowth of storage
improvements. Not until large numbers of songs and videos could be easily
stored on personal hard disks did the music and movie industries get
seriously worried about the networks that began to connect those disks.
Without mass storage, Napster would have been much less relevant.
The expanding capacity of portable drives opens a new front in the
entertainment cartel's war with its customers. Song traders don't need to
use the Internet anymore. They can hold parties in friends' homes, swapping
songs from disk to disk. Soon it will be movies.
I rely on futurists to help me understand what we'll store on disks or
other storage memory, such as flash memory, in the long term.
Gordon Bell, a computer industry legend, imagines wearable devices that
hold everything we've ever seen, heard and said. I'm not crazy about that
vision, but when disks hold a thousand times more than they do today, your
entire life will fit -- plus more books, songs and movies than you could
use in a thousand lifetimes. Yikes.
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Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday and Wednesday. Visit Dan's online
column, eJournal (www.dangillmor.com). E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]; phone
(408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5194970.htm
