Is your hard disk running out of space?

“My hard drive is full of crap and my computer is running out of memory space.” This expression has become very common these days. With movies, MP3s, games, softwares, pictures, document and all sorts of password protected and hidden folders, people tend to overload their computers. “Overload their computers!” well why not.. when they have to pay less than 50 cents per GB of hard disk space.

I remember, my Computing tutor in Junior college once told us, that back in 1979 a 5MB drive (yes, five megabytes) cost over a $1000. Most of you can’t imagine how they even manged- maybe just like how the paleolithic man hunted with stone and wooden tools. Today, with rebates you can pick up 250GB internal IDE hard drives for $90 or so. Grab four, and you’ve got yourself a full terabyte for less than $500. Internal 500GB hard drives have recently appeared on the scene, and go for a premium so they’re still about $350-$375 for the internal versions. Presumably, those will be down in the $175-200 range by this time next year when, hopefully, we’ll be seeing companies releasing 750GB and 1 TB internal drives. What comes after the terabyte? There’s the petabyte (1024-TB). Then comes the Exabyte (1024- PB or exactly 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes). Next is the zettabyte followed by the yottabyte. At this rate of growth, beginning with the 1979 5MB drive we have arrived at one terabyte desktop drive in 30 years.

Considering this increase in capacity of 200,000 to 1 and a fall in price of 10 to 1, I reckon, roughly, that by 30 years hence we will be looking at an Exabyte drive selling less than a $100 giving us the capability of storing data equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video or if you are rich enough to buy five of those you shall be able to store all words ever spoken by human beings till date. And you think you have accumulated enough crap in your hard disk today! Then what will you have to say in years to come? Although I suspect, there will always be those who will still be using their 1TB thumb drive to store their “important” stuff.