[Macworld]

Post your comments for What your hard drive will look like in five years here

[SmartyGuy]

"And, while SSDs will be lagging behind the 500GB to 1TB capacities of hard disk drives for some time to come, McGregor argues that users don't need that much storage anyway."
He lost me there. What planet does he live on?

[natmusak]

SmartyGuy said:

"And, while SSDs will be lagging behind the 500GB to 1TB capacities of hard disk drives for some time to come, McGregor argues that users don't need that much storage anyway."

He lost me there. What planet does he live on?

How many of your friends have 500GB to 1TB drives? How many who don't say they really need that much storage?

[Nodak70]

Probably with me, on Planet NotANerd - -where I manage to fit all of my small business files; two club websites; my entire personal Iphoto and Itunes libraries; and all e-mail since 1990 in half of my 160!

[montgomery_burns]

640K should be enough for everybody.

[bcode]

hahaha, montgomery_burns said it all. Just like Bill Gates did in the 70's, any one who tries to justify HDD space according their lifestyle and their lifestyle alone is just asking to be horrendously wrong.
I create video and high-res images for Press; Typically an image file is between 120-250MB each and video files, when rendered often exceed 100GB each (for about 2 hours video).
1TB is pennies when you start talking about editing a few dozen hours of true HD Video.
If all you do is check your email and write code on your computer... and your files are all less than 1MB; That's fine. Just don't tell me how much space I "need" or don't need. nuf said.

[justme2]

I could see not worrying about large internal hard drives on a desktop system, where it's relatively easy to plug in external drives (or at least it is till Apple discontinues FW on the iMacs), but a large SSD internal drive on a laptop would be great for those wanting to quick-edit video or photos on the fly while on vacation, or who want to be able to take their music/movies with them without having to carry along a portable drive of some sort. (I had enough digital media on my iMac that I had to move the files to an external HD to free up space on the computer for apps and games.)

[ahamling27]

I hate to even bring this up but maybe instead of trying to make bigger and bigger drives that are faster we can reduce the size of media files with better coding and compression. If you can reduce HD video files sizes by 50% wouldn't you be able to uncompress them faster with a faster drive like SSD's?
Just a thought.

[mcgordon]

Nodak70 said:

Probably with me, on Planet NotANerd - -where I manage to fit all of my small business files; two club websites; my entire personal Iphoto and Itunes libraries; and all e-mail since 1990 in half of my 160!

Just to clarify. Is planet NotANerd the same planet where Gmail stores your email for you? Maybe I'm getting it confused with my family photos in 16 color grayscale.

Either way, the Viagra spam I get each year is threatening to overwhelm my Drobo.

[mrbach]

I have 3 terabytes connected to my iMac.
You should see my garage though. I really need to throw stuff out.

[leicaman]

Someone give this guy an HD video camera and tell him to videotape for an hour, and then download it.
Oh, yeah, and remind him that "classic" hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper faster than SSDs are.
But I can see how SSDs would go inside the computer, and then we have massive towers for storage of all our 50 megapixel photos and 4000K videos.

[Rhywun]

the advent of on-line libraries and storage services tend to even out the trends

Yeah, because paying monthly fees to store your stuff in order to take advantage of more expensive Flash storage is much more rational than the current solution.

[alansky]

"McGregor argues that users don't need that much storage anyway."
What the f*??? Has he lost his mind? We're living in the midst of the biggest media explosion in history and this guy thinks users don't need lots of storage? Almost every MacBook Pro owner I know has filled up their 250GB hard drive. The need for mass storage is not (I repeat: not) going away anytime soon. One and two terrabyte RAID drives are ever more popular with owners of huge media libraries that don't even fit on the hard drives of most laptops.

[heisetax]

But we were told that 20 MB hard drives wold be bigger than we wold ever need.
My Intel Mac Pro has 5 TB of internal storage & I have another 4+ TB of external storage using either FW800 or eSATA. And I don't even do much in the photography field as my son does with his Mac. Plus my drives are quite full now. I do have an external case that will hold 4 hdd mounted on easy to change SATA trays. With the cost of my 2 1.5 TB hard drives at less than 4120 it will be sometime before usable sized SSDs are available at under that price.
A reasonably price 512 GB SSD could be usable for a start-p system app storage drive. But HDD will rules for those that need some storage for some time.