The Growth of Storage

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Growth of Storage

  • My guess is currently 20 years.

    Unless there is a full breakthrough on optical / biological storage mechanisms that just are started in research.

    That technology has the potential to reset Moore's law.

    Also that processing is only limited by the speed of light / speed of signal emitting we can build.

  • When we get there. ... soon, very soon. Storage? What Storage?

  • I regret aging myself by saying that my first home pc had 640kb RAM (that's all we'll ever need right? :-D) and 20MB hard drive. I constantly had to delete one application to make room for another as I was learning my way through them.

    I expect it to take less than 20 years.

  • My first computer (apple 2) had 64K of memory.

    Hardware specs for mobile devices will mean less and less as move computing moves to the cloud. My 6 year old PC works just fine for running web apps. You can get 1 TB of memory for your laptop and it won't be any faster than my home PC for most things.

  • I have no idea when we'll get there, but I have no doubt we will, though I truely suspect we will see a return to dumb terminals and huge servers, if not mainframe type servers.

    While we are dating ourselves, my first computer in a High School classroom was 16KB memory and a cassette tape drive, afterwards I graduated to a Commadore 64 for my personal computer, and my first work computer still had only HD 3.5 floppy drives.

  • -=JLK=- (1/18/2013)


    While we are dating ourselves, my first computer in a High School classroom was 16KB memory and a cassette tape drive, afterwards I graduated to a Commadore 64 for my personal computer, and my first work computer still had only HD 3.5 floppy drives.

    You win! My IBM XT had a 5.25 floppy drive and it took 3+ boxes of of them to install my accounting software. Fun times....

  • I think that before we get there storage/RAM on a laptop will become a moot point. We will have virtual machines in a cloud that we will access with a tablet/phone/desktop like device from wherever we are. The virtual machines will have whatever we need or have contracted for and can grow or shrink based on our usage.

  • I think I was sort of saying that! Sure beats clay tablets and sticks!

  • I would like to say that this will never happen, but I believe that "workstations" will only get 2 TB of RAM only when it becomes economically sensible to stop producing chips with smaller capacities (servers or scientific/math calculations are obviously a different story). We definitely can joke about the old "640k should be enough for anyone", but at some point there is no practical reason for more RAM on a "workstation" for example:

    Full HD video is something like 10GB/hr - Let's say in the future we have Quad HD (2160p) 60 FPS 3D movies, that's 160 GB per hour or 320 GB per movie on average (with movies trending longer). Is there any practical purpose to be able to cache six such movies in RAM on a worstation especially considering that network pipes and local storage speeds will also be expanding over time?

  • I would agree with JLK regarding dumb terminals. With the cloud and handheld devices out there, I don't think our home PCs or laptops will see a need to be pushed to those numbers. Do we see major software corporations researching/developing new applications that will require that kind of hardware in our home PCs/laptops? History says Yes, but I'm a skeptic and if I had to pick how long it will take; I would say much longer than 20 years.

  • William Vach (1/18/2013)


    I think that before we get there storage/RAM on a laptop will become a moot point. We will have virtual machines in a cloud that we will access with a tablet/phone/desktop like device from wherever we are. The virtual machines will have whatever we need or have contracted for and can grow or shrink based on our usage.

    What he said

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    How best to post your question[/url]
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    "stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."

  • [font="Verdana"][/font]How much can I save in 20TB?

    Back in the day - say 1975 - a washing machine sized DEC hard disk managed to store 32MB on its seven platters. Two of these units managed a $130M/year beer wine distributor easily with proper maintenance and data control.

    Why would I, a developer, need a 20TB drive... to store anything and everything I'd ever captured, been trapped into capturing (IE pop-ups please), written, received, passively created in spare moments from and to time infinitum.... yes?

    If you are in an LOB at Wells Fargo all the shiny huge servers with tons of RAM chips and flash chip laden SSD's can contribute to shaving the bottom line... but otherwise - start clearing out the junk people!

  • Apparently if you could send an iPad2 back to 1997 it would be the 7th most powerful computer on earth.

    My first computer was a Commodore Vic20 with 3.5K RAM and a 2Mhz 8 bit chip.

    I've got 8GB RAM in my works laptop and some of our devs have 16GB

    My previous works machine originally had 2GB RAM upgraded from 1GB. In 4 years our developer workstations have gone from 1/2 GB to 16GB.

    It isn't a simple mathematical progression, you can't extrapolate out and say that in 6 years they'll be at 1TB.

    The thing that drove the need for increased RAM was the practise of continuous integration. The need to be capable to build and run the entire system and its tests on your local workstation at the same time that you are writing office documents, answering emails and using a browser.

    For us we are also moving to video conferencing so webcams are driving the need for more power.

    There is only so much a single individual can do so unless we end up with interaction via holodeck I can't see the push for increased workstation capacity increasing indefinitely.

    Then there is the renting of processing power in the cloud as has already been mentioned. Will I even need high powered workstations in the future?

  • aberman 63872 (1/18/2013)


    My first computer (apple 2) had 64K of memory.

    Hardware specs for mobile devices will mean less and less as move computing moves to the cloud. My 6 year old PC works just fine for running web apps. You can get 1 TB of memory for your laptop and it won't be any faster than my home PC for most things.

    Yes and no. Win 7 was much faster, IMHO, than previous versions, which seemed to have kept pace with hardware. I hate Word, because it's slow. Unlike Notepad, EditPlus, Notepad++ and more that snap open.

    There's a return to some software that is working better. Also, I can definitely do more on my quad core desktop than on my old laptop and it ran better for some software. Some was just as slow as it was 10 years ago, albeit prettier and with more features.

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