Will Your Hard Drive Hold 600GB?

[Julio Franco]

The standard desktop PC of 2007 will have a hard drive with capacity between 500GB and 600GB, according to Mark Geenen, managing director of research company TrendFocus.
Notebook computers will be fitted with 300GB drives and small drives which can be used in mobile phones and PDAs will be able to store around 20GB, Geenen says.

Read more: PC World.

 

[Rick]

You know, laptop hard drives have been stuck on 80GB for a long time now...

Hope this changes soon.

 

[Didou]

With so much HDD space out of the box, do they really wonder why P2P isn't slowing down ?

 

[Spike]

The question I ask is why?

At a guess, those fiugures are projected from looking at current and previous trends. What they fail to take into account, as that most home users have at the moment absolutely no need for 600GB of HDD space, in fact, 80 GB is more than some wil erer get close to filling. Will manufacturers really spend all that money making pcs with rediculous amounds of space that will never be used?

If you are running a server, great. Or if you want 600 High quality DivX 5.0.4 movies on your computer. what use is it other than that? I thought that was the reason we had DVD's?

 

[Shnig]

Im guessing you dont have broadband spike

 

[Rick]

Spike is right. While more is almost always better, it is a sad (fact?) that most consumers never even come clost to saturating an 80GB, let alone a 300GB... 600GB... And beyond.

I've worked on probably a thousand or more computers. All different to the individual. I've only seen perhaps 2 people fill up anything larger than a 80GB. One of these people was a film student. The other was a download junkie (lots of illegal stuff. )

Aside from special purpose usage (Job, hobbies etc...), the space is really unnecessary for the "average consumer".

But you also have to think of the great benefits of larger drives. Faster speeds being one of them. Having the extra space, although unnecessary, is very nice and the price is right these days too.

 

[Spike]

yea, I have broadband. It's going up from 512 to 1G in a week or two. I download loads, but much of it gets put on CD. why have 12.5 hours of songs taking up 750 MB on my hard drive If I rarely listen to them? I rip my own movies to DivX (Kazaa movies are generally badly ripped), and have one per CD. I've downloaded mandrake, but that was only a couple of Gig. sure, my mere 50 GB of HDD space is just about right for me with my two OS's and two users.

What I could really do with is faster access speeds rather than larger drives. When HDD's become comparible in speed to RAM, that's when terabytes of HDD space might be useful to the average user as far as I can see. It's a long way of though, if it ever comes.

 

[Per Hansson]

Harddrive technology will have a hard time living up to those expectations, it's becoming physically near impossible to improve om the platters and the harddrive heads without spending significant costs on R&D, and that would add up to much more expensive harddrives than we have today...

And as was said above, harddrives does not need to be larger for the general population, if you want more space just run RAID...

 

[Didou]

Originally posted by Spike
why have 12.5 hours of songs taking up 750 MB on my hard drive If I rarely listen to them?

The real question is why download something if you rarely listen to it. Just so you can say you have it ?

 

[Spike]

pml. very true from that perspective.

If I download a song, it's usually bvcause I am checking aout an artist I've never heared of, or seeing if it's worth buying an album. Some of my MP3's are ripped from my own CD's for digital playback.

I'n the main, the tracks I have on CD are tracks I used to listen to a lot, but now liten too rarely. to save ripping or downloading them again, I keep them on CD. I suppose a 600GB drive would make one serious jukebox though! lol

 

[Didou]

Hehe, do not get so defensive Spike. I have quite a lot on my HDD myself. I actually have an HDD for mp3s alone mostly because I hate having to look for the CD & shove it in.

In all, I must say about 20% of it is downloaded without me having the original & I haven't purchased it either because I'm broke right now or couldn't find it in stores or couldn't convince someone to buy it for me. Uh BTW SN, wanna buy me an album off iTunes ???

Uh BTW Mr RIAA lawyer, I was exagerating when I said 20%. I meant 10%, uh wait 5%...

/me deletes a folder...

NONE, I HAVE NONE, NOW STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT !!!

/me runs aWeh...

 

[agissi]

The only way I can see people needing more then 80GBs in the near future, would be because of games. The latest games are taking up 1.5/2GBs+. Other then that I dont see how, even by 2007, we'll need that much space.

Also, as Per Hansson mentioned, how will they fit that much space in to a hard drive? By adding more platters? Surely not, otherwise they'd physically be getting bigger and bigger. Also PH, you said

if you want more space just run RAID...

Why would you run RAID for more space? You can have 5HDs for 'gobbles' of space, and not have them in RAID setup.

 

[Spike]

PML. thanks Didou. Never can be to careful, you know, prying eyes and all that. lol

/me quickly turns on active response on firewall, hides behind three proxies, and cloaks IP address just in case. lol

 

[Shnig]

"Other then that I dont see how, even by 2007, we'll need that much space." Wasnt it bill gates that said we'd never need more then 300kb? You cant see what the future holds aggisi. I for one firmly belive that there is a need for these massive hard drives and wouldnt say no to one now. id say i could fill bout 200gigs in the next month if i tryed.

 

[acidosmosis]

Originally posted by Rick
I've worked on probably a thousand or more computers. All different to the individual. I've only seen perhaps 2 people fill up anything larger than a 80GB. One of these people was a film student. The other was a download junkie (lots of illegal stuff. )

Very true.

 

[Shnig]

Well those who know enough about computers wont Fill any hard drive perposely.

 

[Vehementi]

Well, I'm almost there

I have a 74G Raptor, Dual 120G WD SEs, and another 2 40G drives from Samsung and Seagate That equates to about 400G, but it's 367G in real life.

And I suppose I've filled up 250G of it or so.

 

[Unregistered]

I must admit, I do see a little reason behind having 100+GB worth of hard disk...

I use vmware, (runs os's like MS, linux, solaris etc.) on my laptop while on demo's and quite easily will use 3-4 vmware sessions in a demo, each between 3-10GB (some servers larger) in size and may use 15-30 images in a week for various demo's (different o/s', different UI software (novel groupwise, outlook, internet explorer, eudora, lotus notes etc.), different servers (MS 2000, 2003, ADV, Linux (Red, Suse.) I'm sure you get the point)

Presently I have 2 80GB harddisks (one in a hotswap bay) in my laptop and have reached 140GB this week (I cleaned up a little ) so I can say it would save me having another in my bag and making sure I have the right images on each.

Yes I could put them on DVD, however, even at 8.5GB (my new dual layer ), I couldn't get half my images on a single dvd... add the fact of copying back and fourth would be a real pain.

I need the extra space in my bag for movies when going on flights, not for extra HD's or data dvd's...

Content's already

1 Dell D600
1 Hotswap DVD/CD/RW
1 Hotswap HDD
1 Power Supply
1 Power Adpter
1 External USB/FW HDD (60GB) (for delivering data/images to customers)
2 Mobile Phones + Chargers
1 LCD Projector
Cables, mouse, WiFi Router,
Most importantly... 2 Spare Pack's of Cig's 1 Spare Lighter (and a airplane bottle of scotch (for emergencies of course))

So more harddrive, yes please, 200-500GB Hey I could carry MP3's and a few movies on disk as well.. Great.

Power user.

 

[Unregistered]

Anime junkies waste tons of hd space, I for one filled up a 250gb hd in only 1-2 months of time, and burning stuff takes a lot of time+switching and labeling. So for insane people like me I'd need more than a mere 80gb.

 

[Phantasm66]

I have a plan to buy 4 X 300GB SATA HDD and RAID 5 SATA controller card sometime next year, in order to create a 1.2TB RAID 5 volume for holding movies.

 

[MYOB]

I've got 200GB in my desktop, a 80GB small external, host-powered USB, HDD and a 300GB big external USB/FW HDD. I barely use 150GB across the lot of them.

We're getting a situation where HDD's will be too big.

 

[LNCPapa]

My FFXI install alone is 6.53 GB. I have a few games that now arrive on DVD. I have 30+ games installed on my gaming machine. I also have 47 gig of MP3s on my file server and I rip new CDs everytime I want to hear something I haven't ripped yet. I'd prefer to move to a lossless audio compression method - but space is becoming a factor for me. All together I have around 1.6 TB of hard drive space and I am hurting for more. My dept at work - consisting of 6 people now - just ordered a 2.8 TB Apple Xserve RAID just for us to store our files - because we're all running out of space. I agree that the entry level user today has a problem filling up 80 gig - but as the OS and applications become easier to use people will be more willing to do things like save their music to their hard drives and capture/edit video. Keep in mind that 1 hour of DV video is 13 gig - and a normal miniDV tape is 60 minutes long. Also keep in mind that miniDV cameras are dirt cheap these days and broadband is mainstream. Digital cameras avg 3-5 megapixel easily resulting in jpgs over 1 meg each. I have taken nearly 1 gig worth of photos of my daughter - and she's only 3.5 weeks old! That includes deleting the bad images.

I think we're going to need this space. The only people that won't get a benefit from this are those who use their computers as glorified typewriters and informational search engines.

 

[MYOB-loginlazy]

My FFXI install alone is 6.53 GB. I have a few games that now arrive on DVD. I have 30+ games installed on my gaming machine. I also have 47 gig of MP3s on my file server and I rip new CDs everytime I want to hear something I haven't ripped yet. I'd prefer to move to a lossless audio compression method - but space is becoming a factor for me. All together I have around 1.6 TB of hard drive space and I am hurting for more. My dept at work - consisting of 6 people now - just ordered a 2.8 TB Apple Xserve RAID just for us to store our files - because we're all running out of space. I agree that the entry level user today has a problem filling up 80 gig - but as the OS and applications become easier to use people will be more willing to do things like save their music to their hard drives and capture/edit video. Keep in mind that 1 hour of DV video is 13 gig - and a normal miniDV tape is 60 minutes long. Also keep in mind that miniDV cameras are dirt cheap these days and broadband is mainstream. Digital cameras avg 3-5 megapixel easily resulting in jpgs over 1 meg each. I have taken nearly 1 gig worth of photos of my daughter - and she's only 3.5 weeks old! That includes deleting the bad images.

I think we're going to need this space. The only people that won't get a benefit from this are those who use their computers as glorified typewriters and informational search engines.

I don't game much and I still prefer paper photographs. I download very little music and rip only DVD's I've rented/borrowed and not those I've bought

I still use my PC very productively, in my opinion. What uses the largest amount of space on my machine is object files, obviously from coding, and hence a productive use.

Media hoarders, gamers and file sharers will benifit from this. 95% of users and probably still 70% of "techies" won't

 

[Unregistered]

I think we're going to need this space. The only people that won't get a benefit from this are those who use their computers as glorified typewriters and informational search engines.

Maybe companies should use this, market "Lite" computers for those who only want to type and read, and maybe listen to an MP3 album or 2. Specs could be:

400-500 MHz CPU
128MB RAM
4GB HDD

It might also be nifty to have it all contained inside a keyboard.

 

[bushwhacker]

My hard drive is Seagate 80.0Gb Baccauda 7200.7 8meg cache SATA, it is fast enough, but the post say 600gb, that is too big for me. I merely used up almost 1/5 of 73.9gb. They contain games, pictures, DVD and some old Win95b i am modding since. I should say for the average gamer should satifised about 160-200gb is enough.

:approve: