[heyjp]

I'm a pretty aggressive user of media (70 Gig of music from 25 years of collecting, 80 Gig of photos from a decade). So at that rate, I generate 12 Gig/year of music and photos. Although, the "standard" for music has just jumped from 128Kbps to 256 KBps from the iTunes store. And, I just jumped from a 3 to a 15 Mpixel camera. So I figure I'll be generating 25 Gig per year even before I start throwing TV and Movie on my hard disk.

Even movies are in the process of jumping from 5 Mbps (MPEG 2) to 30 Mbps (BluRay)... 6x the size.

So, when you couple more and more people doing more and more with media... and the media itself is doubling in size (with 4x th quality) every 3-4 years... I think we'll stay on the edge of storage.

I could see myself with an SSD iPhone device and SSD MacBook Air device but still with a HD on a MacBook Pro and/or home server.

Boy, this new technology stuff is fun!

JP

[alansky]

bsfa:

The guy in the article is a certified moron. He didn't say "some users" or even "most users". He stated flatly: "...users don't need that much storage anyway." Which is an absurdly ignorant thing to say.

[Frost7]

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?

Ditto. I just popped a 1.5TB Seagate in my G5. Was all of $110 from NewEgg. He expects me to go back to crap capacities and pay 5 times as much or more?

Apparently, he's from a planet where money grows on trees and people use 1990s levels of data.

[thebiggfrogg]

My Mom on her CRT iMac get by with a 6 GB hard drive with room to spare. I have filled a 500 GB, four 160 GBs, an 80 GB and a 30 GB and am looking at a 1.5 TB soon. What you need depends on how you use your computer. What is so difficult to understand about that?

[natimarley]

Anyone marginally involved with recording as a musician is going to find 250GB unacceptable. A casual collection of images of the family with cameras increasing image file size, as well is already pushing the limits of what is considered standard size drives. iTunes doubling of music file sizes, again is just another example of how poorly thought out this article's author ideas are.

[heisetax]

I also got a couple of those 1.5 TB drives to add to my 2 1 TB Seagate ES drives in my Intel Mac Pro. So I agree with you on the need for size by many. As others have said that they or relatives or friends have -6 GB drives with 50% or more empty. That's the way it always will be. Actually I'd like to have a reasonably priced 512 GB SSSD for se in an Intel Mac Pro as well as in an Intel MacBook Pro. Then add to that the normal 4 hdd for the tower & 1 2.5" hard drive for the laptop. In that way the OS, programs & some of the other needed items can be on an SSD. Then for those of us that fill a 1.5 TB drive up in short order, we can have some eSATA/FW800 external drives hooked to most of our Macs to satisfy most of us. Presently I can hook p 26 eSATA drives internally or externally to my Intel Mac Pro. Add to that the 67 FW800 devices & 67 FW 400 devices, 127 USB devices, who knows what the limit to NAS drives can be, & that cloud storage like our old .mac accounts. So most of s will run out of money long before we have all of the storage we can have But while we mortgage or house for more storage, others will be using their 2 GB hard drives & see no reason for a bigger one.

Have fun with your system. That's all you can expect.

[spiderbat]

Bypassing a peripheral interface and making the mass storage a part of the computer motherboard is sure a way to speed up communication. Anyway, given the present attitude of companies that produce electronic appliances, Apple included, I wouldn't be surprised if this option were implemented in a way that forced the user to throw away the entire computer as result of a "drive" failure.

[Luke77]

Re: What will your hard drive look like in five years?
What about people in the Music Industry? We have many software titles that weigh in at 50 GB and more! It does not take long to fill a 1 TB hard drive.
Then those musicians that score to film, or for advertisements, eat up even more hard drive space. What about musicians that are into photography as well, and some who synchronize music to photography collages? My 1 TB drives fill up very quickly. We should try to consider all computer users, many who rely on a great deal of hard drive space, plus drives for backing up.

[BirdmanHD]

Ok so there are two trends of comments going here, and both may be right. First, I'm only going to address one theme. The ability and need for a larger and larger HDD devices is certainly real and will continue. I'm a producer and cameraman, and in this business we are getting PUSHED into digital storage. This is very unsettling for a variety of reasons. But for one specific - tape is a relatively known, stable long term (10 years) storage medium. In my end of the business, I document birds and wildlife that are increasing rare. I want to A) aquire in the highest possible Quality format. B) keep these images stable and beautiful for years if not generations to come.

Mac Gregor's statement is not based upon an archival perspective. And while many folks out there maybe able to happily exist with 160 GB of storage, this is somewhere on the small end of the bell curve. I exist out on the opposite end of that same curve. This spring for ONE film I will purchase 12 TB and then just for editing we'll go with at least another 6TB. We are incorporating 4 distinct HD cameras into one project. One is HDCAM still arguably the best image around. The other is a tiny Toshiba used for perspective shots., 3rd is a very high speed imager for slow motion and 4th is the new Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Each of these are unique and bring advantages and huge files.

Compression is NOT a good thing. This is why film went down screaming and kicking. But in the end the higher costs of producing shooting and editing in film is what brought that down. Film lasted for about 130 years. Now a format is lucky to last a few years.

Optical disks claim to present 100 years of archival stability. But How many in this forum, have a computer that can read a 5.25" floppy from about 20 years ago???

Solid state is clearly coming on quickly but what new device got discovered yesterday?

One commenter spoke about how things could get smaller in terms of file size... but this never happens and if you try to stick with one program (re: Word Perfect) you soon find you are running an OS which is long gone just to stick with one program....

My hopes is that the recession will slow us all down again to a more sane pace. While we are stimulating everything to get the economy going again we will be continuing practices which are still going to bring us down as a species if we do not heed the lessons. Some one once said- Slow and steady wins the race.

[Luke77]

Hi BirdmanHD,

Wow! Do you ever need a lot of hard drive space! I wish you all the best in all of your endeavors.

It sure would be nice, if technology would just slow down for a while, and not render something we purchased 3 years ago obsolete. It seems as soon as all the bugs are fixed in an application, or OS, the software companies have to come out with a new and " improved " version. Then it is bug city, all over again.

Maybe with this recession, computer owners will not jump on the bandwagon for getting the latest and greatest. This just gives the technology companies more money to " improve " their wares, and make so many of our programs, apps, OS, etc. obsolete so quickly. And the cycle of bugs and fixes just keeps on going...........

I purchased a G5, in 2005. I was very comfortable with using Tiger 10.4.11, using Logic. This past summer, an authorized Apple repair store, blew up my G5. I was forced to get a Mac Pro. Then I found out that there are a lot of programs that have not been ported over to the Intel Processors yet. It is going to take a while for me to get things back in order. This is just one example of the downside of how quickly the technology treadmill is moving. Myself, along with many of my colleagues, would just like to settle in with our systems and create, and not try to keep up with technology, like I was forced to do this past summer.

Take care BirdmanHD. Again, all the best!

[hillstones]

At least a hard drive offers a chance of recovery, since it is a physical disc. When memory goes bad, it is gone for good. This will happen with SSD's. No chance of recovery if the memory fails. So I would rather stick with a hard drive than SSD. 20 years ago my Mac Plus had a 40 MB drive. Back in the day, that was huge. However, a single program can now have an update patch of a few hundred megabytes, that wouldn't even fit on the 40 MB drive. So the guy is a complete moron to assume that "users" won't need 500 GB to 1 TB in storage, especially in five years!

[Luke77]

Hi hillstones,

You are right on. I do not know where this guy is coming from at all. It seems as though he is a bit " out of the loop ". At the rate things are going, in five years, a 1 TB hard drive will probably be laughable, as far as storage devices go. Only a couple of years ago, 500 GB was huge!

Hope all is going well with you. Take care.

[BirdmanHD]

Right on Hillstones. That is a great point and piece of information about SSD's.

Again, as I accumulate images and sounds in very high quality (and I keep upgrading to the highest quality i can afford) I need archival level storage. If we are forced to capture on P2 type cards or compact flash so be it, but the images of endangered Alala (Hawaiian Crows- a species Now extinct in the wild) was captured on good old Digital Betacam tape. that was a fantastic capture medium in the late 1990's. Those images CAN NEVER be recaptured.

The species survives in captivity but can never be reintroduced to the wild it appears, as the very complex feeding habits of a species that roamed an island and the timing there of... which fruits are ripe at which altitude and now we need to fly to the coast because those little crabs come up on the beaches in March... etc etc etc... HUMANS can't TEaCh a bird to be a bird..
unless we are willing for them to be stupid scavengers in McDonalds parking lots....

I'm going philosophical for a moment so be forewarned...

We seem to be in the midst of a major shifting point in our country. Many of us in business are poised on the edge and the proverbial double edged sword is cutting in both directions. In one way, you can't afford to not get the latest and greatest on the other sense haste does not make up for the waste. The consumerism is awful yet the society is built on the flow of money. Paradoxes surround us.

If one opens up our "higher end" TV cameras- they are just computer boards with storage devices attached, Lens on front, battery on the back, microphone on top and ports for lighting etc. The large companies 'wealth' is based upon short term profits. No concern for the long term health of anything. In one respect Steve Jobs illness is a reflection of this irony. No matter how many billions ($$$) he has- it won't keep him around one second longer than his body allows.

Apple was for so long a company that prided it self on being the best. Making the finest computers and GREAT software. There was always the tension of whether they would survive til next year or whether Microsoft or IBM would slay them.

Seems like that smallness kept them great for a long time, and they built a Great corporate culture too. This is good. Apple does respond to customers- or at least they did. FCP needs a major update and MUST include Blu-ray soon.

Sigh- another NEW technology.

Environmentally, unless your name is Dick ( why do the real crooks seem to be named Dick-?), we are approaching a major worsening. We are not there yet. Just one example- Our beef is raised in very destructive methods hurting grasslands, topsoil, and any species daring to compete with cows. So we kill bison, prairie dogs, ground squirrels, and spray herbicides to kill any flowers or other species that might grow where one blade of an imported grass might be grazed to the level of dirt by herds that are over doing it. Then we ship them to feed lots which again various chemicals stimulate growth, and they live for months on top of huge piles of cow shit. Then they are sent to slaughter houses, and processed. Mmmm. Yummy.

So we wonder why the rich folks all eat organically.....

My next film is on a species in precipitous decline - right here in the US. The Greater Prairie Chicken. Watch for it this fall. There is going to be a bunch of stuff like the cycle of beef included.

This is not well tied together but to do so would take a long time and be too complex for this forum and thread and I apologize to those who find this a totally spaced out tangent.... But the irony of the folks up here who are upset with one person for saying one thing takes me to the perspective of when i was in Ecuador in 2007 in a soot stained wooden house (3 rooms) and the people were so happy and generous. So generous. Surrounded by the destruction- they were hacking into the jungles and knowing we were making a film on wildlife they took time to come to us and make us a wonderful meal... In their terms.

The ability to help change things is through our ancient traditions of story-telling and that is now done world wide on computers and with tiny little windows on YouTube.... Meantime, we are seeing cameras with 21-30 Million pixels in the still range, and soon incredible motion devices with frames of 8k capacity with high speed, time lapse and possibly 3D coming too. The need to tell the story can be accomplished with the lips, tongue and lungs. But changing our behavior in time to save our species... that has to be a world wide effort and may actually be best done through the little pictures flying through the air. Otherwise in 5 years, who will care if there is a SSD or HDD?

That is an overly pessimistic statement but reflective of the potential. It is great to be alive and immersed in the beauty, even if I am totally aware of the great irony.

[MacSnapon]

Well said, Mr. Gates! That's right!

Who needs a hard drive anyways if you have two good floppy drives and a tape recorder?

At this point, there is only enough demand for nine, maybe ten, DVD burners in the world.