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.

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

Hope this changes soon.

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

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?

Im guessing you dont have broadband spike

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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...

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

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

"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.

Very true.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.