Do you think we'll see petabytes in home computers?

[wannaturnuptheheat]

Just wondering idly... for those of you not keeping up with your SI prefixes, peta- is a step above tera-, 10^15.

I know that it seems crazy now, but hell, 5 years ago (if that) it was nuts to think a terabyte would be practical... and a couple before that, gigabytes were astounding, and so on.

EDIT: And what could POSSIBLY need that much space in the future?

Because really, aren't terabyte-sized hard drives already primarily for people with hundreds of games and movies saved to their HDD?

 

[jitpublisher]

Well, as far as games and movies, music and like, in the not too far future downloading them will pointless I foresee. You will be able to stream anything you want anytime you want, why bother with saving it?

 

[sminlal]

Technology marches on. Historically it's taken around 20 years for disk storage capacities to increase by a factor of about 1000. That trend has held roughly constant for the last 40 years or so (although it was obscured by the fact that form factors shrunk by a huge amount in the 1990s) and if it continues then petabyte drives should arrive around 2030 or so.

What will they hold? There's lots of storage demand in industry, home computers are another matter. If video resolutions and framerates keep increasing, that will certainly eat up some of it. I for one wouldn't mind getting my entire collection of DVDs onto a set of redundant hard drives - that would probably take around 10TB or so. The same thing in BluRay would take 2-3 times as much storage.

If Camcorders ever start having the capability of storing "raw" image data the way still cameras do, that will multiply the demand for video storage by factors of 10 or more. If the storage is available and cheap enough, some people would rather not use lossy compression for those types of things.

And who knows what else is just over the horizon?