Disks!

[mmcirvin]

As I've said before, the explosion in mass storage is the great unsung technology story of the past decade. Or not exactly unsung, since it made TiVos and iPods possible (and, if you extend it to solid state, it made practical digicams possible as well).

It's more amazing than the advance in processor speeds, more amazing than the drop in RAM prices, and way more amazing than the increase in network capacity. And it's nullified a lot of futurology that was less savvy than IBM's. When the Internet was becoming hot stuff, people imagined all kinds of thin-client things going on: most PCs would give way to little diskless NCs and everyone would stream everything from a server by broadband all the time. Streaming was the future of digital music, because who'd buy a 100-gigabyte monster of a disk array just to store their record collection? But that's exactly what many people do today; you can put a 40-gig one in your pocket, even if you don't have a very large pocket. Diskless is the opposite of where everything went. Big disks leapfrogged broadband by years, especially in backward places like the United States.

Comments

[avocado123.livejournal.com]

When you said "explosion in mass storage", I was all like YEAH! That place that lets you rent a big hollow Tupperware Lego-like container to put stuff in and they take it to a big building filled with Lego-like containers and you pay rent, that is SO COOL!

But you just mean we put 4 gatrillion gig on our computers so we can download last week's "Futurama" instead of watching it the way God and Greyhound intended.

Hey. We're Americans. But imagine how many gig would fit in those big hollow Lego-like containers!

[psw.livejournal.com]

At this point, I'm always a little suspicious when we hear from the computer industry about eliminating something when an obviously superior solution doesn't already exist. Remember the hype about the paperless office? Unless I somehow, uh, missed the memo, this hasn't happened yet.

I'm also amazed by the increases in storage density and reductions in cost. Another tiny-and-cheap-storage anecdote: I bought a new cell phone last week. It's one of those models with a built-in (craptastic) camera and a few other bells and whistles. The phone stores a filesystem on a "TransFlash" card, which is about 1.5cm x 1cm x 1mm; it's really tiny. The card comes with an adapter to make it big enough it fit into an SD card slot (the SD card is about three times as thick and maybe five times the surface area). Capacity is 128 megabytes, and it cost less than $40. For comparison: the first hard disk I bought (20 years ago) was 1/10th the capacity at 10x the price (ignoring inflation).