Yet we're still filling them up. It's a losing battle. I was perfectly ok with a 20megabyte HD in 1993. I was comfortable with a couple hundred megs in 1996. A few gigs was comfortable in 2000.
Today, I have 6gig worth of scanned photos on my computer at home. I don't even do the digital music or video thing and my 80gig HD is nearly half full.
Talk about behind the times. I slapped a 500gig HD in my latest computer.
As soon as there's a new breakthrough in storage technology, people will increase the quality of their digital media files to take advantage of it. When terabyte drives become commonplace, folks will still be whining about full drives.
In 1993 what did you keep on a computer HD? Probably pretty much only applications and associated data files. You could only keep a couple games installed.
In 1996 Games had gotten better, office applications were fancier and if you were bleeding edge you might be getting into digital music.
2000 - around what I'd consider the serious start of the MP3 craze. A couple years later I was downloading anime of the internet.
2007 - I can get a 1TB drive for $340. Or 2 500GB for $210(total).
I've been a member of webscription.net(DRM free ebooks) for years. A book, on average, is less than half a meg compressed. I couldn't read a TB worth of books in my life.
MP3? 256k would be about 2Meg/minute. Or about 8 hours per gig. 8k hours on a terabyte storage array. Or just short of a no-repeat YEAR of high quality audio, as 256k is double that of standard MP3s.
So text and audio are pretty much covered, on to video.
DVD is ~5Mbit/s for both audio and video. That'd be 56 hours of video on a TB. Please be aware though that DVD is MPEG-2 is a pretty lousy compression method today, such that by shifting to a more advanced codec you can easily stream superior quality HD content with the same bitrate.
Going off figuring for blueray discs and advanced codec, 160 hours of HD video can fit into a TB, or about 80 2 hour films. If you don't like epics, I could see 100-120 easily. Like music, after a certain point you start coming up against equipment limitations, and a bit beyond that you go beyond what our eyes are capable of. So I don't see data rates taking off to much beyond this. Increases in quality balanced against improvements in codecs.
If we stick to DVD+ quality with advanced codec, a 2mbit DSL link can just about stream. If we figure this is the future, a 10mbit or even 100mbit link shouldn't be out of reach - So I could subscribe to a video equivalent to iTunes, purchase my movies from it, and download to my (theoretical at this point) multiterabyte array. The system could intelligently dispose of lesser watched videos. If I want to watch something that I've already purchased, current case would be to queue it up, and grab some popcorn or something while it's caching. I could then start watching the show while it continues to download in the background. While not as 'instant' as popping a DVD in, with a good internet connection it'd still beat driving to the store. And you have the search capabilities and full library - not just what the store chooses to stock.
I don't know about you guys, but my multimedia library is getting uncontrollable. At $10 average for a movie, CD, or book, I have almost a dozen bookcases worth of them collected over the years. I get the urge to reread a book I last read two years ago, or want to reread a series, it can be a real hassle to find it. With it on the computer, I can just do a search.
