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10 Fun Facts About Storage

gigaom.com — The New York Times had a nice story about dressy hard drives that reminded me how much of our digital lives are dependent on this often ignored low-margin business. As mentioned before, from iPod to TiVo to our set-top boxes - everything is touched by storage.

Who dugg this? Made popular Mar 10, 2007

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43 Comments

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  • SirNoobius, on 10/12/2007, -4/+28before you had to throw away old porn or ones that weren't your favourite. now you get to keep them all.
  • roneewong, on 10/12/2007, -3/+22I know
    thank god I don't have to make that choice anymore!
  • dominasian, on 10/12/2007, -8/+24"Consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year. That is 11 times what they bought in 2003. (NYT)"
    some people sure have a lot of porn
  • Silencer7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11I believe you mean,

    "Error reading joke. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?"
  • SirNoobius, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9we don't need people documenting every stinking thought they have.

    KILL BLOGGERS
  • Rub3s, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Hard drives used to mainly hold programs and documents, then they needed to be upgraded to hold pictures (porn), then music started taking all the space (copyright infringement) so they got upgraded again, now video hogs all the disk space (porn and copyright infringement) and 500 GB is not enough.
    What will fill the hard drives of tomorrow? (porn and copyright infringement)
  • chingy1788, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9DVDs are cheaper per gigabyte than Hard Drives
    In Australia HDD Space goes for about 40c per GB (320GB for ~ $130)
    and DVD Space - 50 pack DVD (50x4.7GB = 235GB) for $15 ~ 6c per GB
    although it takes much more physical space
    but what the hell

    all prices in AUD
  • dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6[They are also much slower.] They are also read-only, and a lot less convenient. The reason they are cheaper is probably because they are a lot easier to manufacture than HDD's (Seeing as their basically plastic discs with shiny foil attached)
    Hm, I wonder how much CD's compare to DVD's price-per-GB-wise..
  • merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Ferraris are also more expensive than Hondas.

    What's your point?
  • gzim, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7I remember reading that the need for storage is rising faster than our ability to store it, and that even with quantum computers there aren't enough atoms on earth to store all the information projected for 100 years from now.
  • loki440, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yeah DVDs are cheaper but are a much bigger pain in the ass to deal with. I have a music library that's only 36 gigs, but backing it up on DVD was ***** tedious and slow. External hard drives offer added convenience along with storage capacity.
  • blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4FTA: "# Consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year. That is 11 times what they bought in 2003. (NYT)
    # In the U.S. alone, $600 million worth of external hard drives were sold in 2006, up 53% from 2005, The NPD Group, a market research firm, says. (NYT)"

    These numbers don't add up. $600 million of external @ < $1/GB is at least 600 million GB of space. Is NYT saying that over 80% of the consumer hard drive market is external drives? I would find that extremely hard to believe.
  • blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2They are also much slower.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2In the first half of 2006, externals were more expensive than $1/gig. Some were as expensive as $2-5/gig.

    The External market was really overpriced before, but now it's not so bad. My WD My Book wasn't too awful for 500 gigs. $200 or so, I believe.
  • merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3An "external drive" is just an internal drive in a box, with a small PSU, and some sort of IDE/SATA/SCSI to USB/Firewire/Ethernet adapter. So the price of a cheap external drive shouldn't really ever be much more than $20-$100 more than the equivalent internal drive.
  • spokenrope, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3What's with comparing everything last year to 2003? Make all the progress seem more significant?
  • chingy1788, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Lets hope so

    Flash memory costs 30 times more than HDD space - $130 for 320GB HDD(40c/GB) and $51 for 4GB Flash Drive(~$12/GB)
    prices in AUD

    so i hope flash mem goes down as well
  • Eccles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I was in comp sci grad school in '91, when our IT head made a presentation and mentioned that the department had a combined total storage space of 90 gigabytes, and I recall thinking that was a staggering amount. Now I have twice that in my current machine, and it's close to full.
  • flashcat7777, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Interesting read
  • dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Erm, At "this" rate HDD's could cost 0.01c per TB.. Of course disc-space will get cheaper as time goes on - Just look at the prices of drives a few years ago compare to today..
  • mitch3323, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1who cares?
  • decipherd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1of course, this doesn't account for the fact that most information is duplicated many many times, for example software - the same information can be stored identically millions of times which is a huge waste of space. Perhaps in the world 100 years in the future we wont all need our own copies...

    (think googleplex ;-) )
  • nonokiaboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Awesome. Just awesome.
  • Radionesiac, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3sometimes when my dog poops i scoop it up with my hands and put it in the freezer and eat it with twizzlers i callit twizzlerpoop ice pops
  • LordSkywalker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Have you been looking on my hard drive?!

    But yeah, I realized how cheap hdds are now when a friend asked about the costs and I told him he could get a Terabyte of space for $300.
  • mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well, if high-end components are too expensive for you, do what google does - get a ton of consumer-level components and set up massive redundancy. That $1000 could instead buy 10 320 gb SATA drives. Use 8 for a RAID 10 array and keep the other two as replacements - that should be faster, have more space, and have better reliability than the expensive server drive. Of course, if you were going to make a large array out of the server drives, inexpensive drives might result in too much complexity (too many drives for the controller, for instance.) But it's an option to consider
  • Anonymous3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0What's the best thing to use for long term read-only storage that I don't have to upgrade? The dye in CDs and DVDs fades which makes them unreadable, and hard drives fail mechanically just after three years for me (yeah, uncanny given 3year warranty), and tape is prohibitively expensive. I've been thinking about using flash drives for absorbing some of my long term storage needs... ideas anyone?
  • chingy1788, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1again
    "but what the hell"
  • hugejimmy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1AWESOME
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0DVD's are for your backups. They're cheap so burn two copies and keep one off site. Since optical media does still rot over time even with the best storage, keeping a third copy on HDD (with redundancy through RAID) is a good idea.

    DVD's and hard drives are cheap. Computers come and go. Your collection of porn, music, movies, etc is priceless. (Or at least a bitch to re-download.)
  • divabox, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Not so useful but interesting facts about storage, really...
  • sephiroth965, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I got my 500 My Book from staples with a price of $120 and a $40 mail-in rebate bringing it down to just about $90 including tax. They aren't expensive at all.
  • Poco, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1That is sort of a silly statement. That all depends on what you think is worth storing.

    I mean, maybe I want to store information about every atom on earth, with backups. Then I would say we have reached that point right now. So what?
  • mwheeler1982, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0One thing to take into consideration is that while consumer drives are cheap, enterprise drives are very expensive. When you purchase drives for a SAN, you could pay $1000 (or more) for a 750GB 7200RPM SATA drive.. They have really taken a low cost market and artifically created a high cost one.
  • saintsfan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1At this rate HDDs could cost 1c per GB
  • jesusismetal, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3Fail.
  • chingy1788, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1i had that thought running across my mind
  • rshu4you, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1I want an An Exabyte Drive
  • Chazzzer, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Oh, you mean computer storage . . thought is was about stashing my old box springs and broken tvs in a big metal locker.
  • rshu4you, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0laugh at me now, look at the girl who said computer would have 4 GB of RAM
  • rshu4you, on 10/12/2007, -7/+0RIAA is right, STOP file sharing!!!!!!
  • maximumsteve1, on 10/12/2007, -11/+4i'm in ur hard drive, stealin ur extra gigabytez
  • Samsong, on 10/12/2007, -10/+1Yes it was
    =)

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