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alebar14

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 14, 2007
180
0
Auckland CBD, New Zealand
Hi guys,

I would like to ask for your different opinions and open discussions about the future good use of our capacity space.

In today's technology as a general consumer ,we enjoy using gadgets such as digital camera, video camera, MP3s, etc as a pleasure. After we got home, we want to store and backup our digital files onto a piece of another vault gadget called hard drive - so we can check,edit,print and share around the world. A hard drive itself has a various size ranging from a smallest data size of 512 MB up to 1.5 TB depending on our needs. Todays, most of the people would go from 80 GB - 200 GB for their general use: Office documents, games, photos, family video, mp3s, etc.

But for a prosumer such as 3D animators, moving images artists, etc. they never had enough with the capacity itself and it will keep growing in a near future. One obvious reason are 3D animators and movie makers-they use lots of space to render their creative works.

What about those general consumer ? In a near future, it's likely possible to see 5 TB internal hard drive on every consumer's house with up to 50 TB external hard drive. Looking at today's capacity use of our diskspace: if you only play hard-core games, or do a simple Microsoft office works at office/home,or just watch Blu-Ray movies, or do any 2 print design works, where the rest of the capacity will good to use then ? It's seems an awfully waste of diskspace anyway...
 

Scarlet Fever

macrumors 68040
Jul 22, 2005
3,262
0
Bookshop!
You absolutely correctness. I can't believe people waste diskspace so awful. 640KB should be enough for everyone, don't you think?
 

PlaceofDis

macrumors Core
Jan 6, 2004
19,241
6
its not like the diskspace is going to take up more room physically. unless they start making drives larger than 3.5".

also as time goes one people accumulate more stuff. and the more stuff you accumulate the more space you need. and games and software are always needing more space than the ones a year before. so the space will be needed and most likely used by the time drives that size are released.
 

sammich

macrumors 601
Sep 26, 2006
4,305
268
Sarcasmville.
Apart from moving away from a standard form factor, what stops manufacturers making larger hard drives (>3.5")? Power consumption? practicality? Potentially more data lost when something happened to the disk? Because the storage area increases at a rate proportional to the radius squared. What about a 4.5" drive?
 

OwlsAndApples

macrumors 6502a
Oct 4, 2006
513
1
UK
It is true that lots of space goes unused, but is it necessarily being wasted? As already pointed out it's not using anymore physical space etc.

Anyway, when SSDs get cheaper per Gb we may see an acceptance of lower capacity storage for the performance benefits. But hey, that will take a while...
 

joshysquashy

macrumors 6502a
May 13, 2005
707
1
UK
As time moves forwards, technology progresses, drives become bigger, and cheaper, file sizes get bigger as we want high def, better quality, more videos and the processors etc are able to cope with these files. It is a natural progression.

For a while I felt that in the future, disk space would no longer be an issue and people would never run out, but that isn't so, because its supply and demand, you give someone a bigger disk and he fills it!

I was fine with an 80gb hdd in my laptop. Now I have a 250GB hdd, and have used 150GB of it already! If only they made them bigger, they will soon!

Also with the internet speeding up, larger files are being downloaded. Soon people will download 1TB movies and the such! Its hard to imagine currently, but it will happen.
 

Killyp

macrumors 68040
Jun 14, 2006
3,859
7
No not really. Greater amounts of disk space means companies can produce their software to a more polished finish, people can store higher quality videos, higher quality music, and higher quality photos...
 

Markleshark

macrumors 603
Aug 15, 2006
6,249
10
Carlisle, Up Norf!
I don't see the problem.

I have a File Server setup for all my 'Stuff', it cost me less than £200 and I'm able to upgrade the HDDs as I need them.

Who cares how much disc space I use? It's cheap as chips.
 

benpatient

macrumors 68000
Nov 4, 2003
1,870
0
Power consumption? practicality? Potentially more data lost when something happened to the disk? Because the storage area increases at a rate proportional to the radius squared. What about a 4.5" drive?


several things:

•*standardization across markets
• convenience of size. (larger drives are just awkward to deal with)
•*increasing density is cheaper in the long run than increasing physical size
• mechanical failure increases as rotational mass increases (larger, or rather heavier, platters exert more force on the bearings at the center of the platter.)
 
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