I predict...

[Lil Chillbil]

Like the kilobyte in the 80s the megabyte in the 90s and the gigabyte in the 00s
I predict that by the end of this decade the term "terabyte" will become commonplace in hard drives everywhere and that by the year 2020 we will be able to go down to fries and by a 150 terabyte harddrive.

Who thinks so to ?

 

[velocityg4]

At the rate capacity has been increasing I'm guessing 64TB by 2020 in 3.5inch hard drives. With the OS and App bloat taking up 8TB and user files taking up 4.6GB or one DVD on average.

In reality though I think only data centers, companies and individuals with needs for massive amounts of data storage where I/O performance and read/write speeds are secondary will still be buying hard drives. For most the emphasis will be on speed with the SSD rather than capacity. Current SSD tech provides more than enough capacity for the vast majority of users for the same price as hard drives used in most new computers.

Really OEM manufacturers need to drop the 1TB consumer/business desktop and 500GB laptop and replace each with 64GB or 128GB SSD drives. The small minority that actually needs more space can buy a hard drive or BTO it.

 

[Lagmonster]

4K video will replace HD video before you realize it too!

 

[MacTech68]

I predict that by 2020 some new technology will surpass the 3.5" platter HD and SSD.

Pixie Dust was great at getting us past the hurdle circa 2001, but I don't see current hard drive technology breaking the next capacity barrier without some radical change in the density of the medium.

Who knows what's coming? I have no idea. Will storage capacity increase? Certainly, yes. Will it involve flash memory? Possibly not.

Does flash memory have it's place in operating system and application storage? Yes, I believe it does and may do up to and beyond 2020 but I don't believe it will suit long-term mass-storage for home media servers.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Terabyte is already common in desktop hard drives. At recent storage-capacity increase rates, though, 150 TB is more like 2025 than 2020. Average increase rate is a doubling every 18 months to two years. Generally 18 months for SSDs.

Spinning-platter drives currently top out at 4 TB, SSDs at just shy of 1 TB. (Not counting truly insanely expensive completely custom models.)

2020 is 8 years away, or four platter doublings, five SSD doublings. So we're looking at 64 TB for spinning-platter, and 32 TB for SSDs. And there have been stalls in capacity increases before. We seem to be just ending one now. (We were stuck at 3 TB for over two years, and only squeaked out a 4 TB.)

Seagate just announced a "breakthrough" a couple months ago that they say will allow for 60 TB desktop hard drives... Just over a decade from now. The first drives with these capacities aren't out yet - the first doubling of 3 TB in three years.

Plus, the highest-capacity models always significantly more per storage unit (GB, TB...) than the next-largest model, so the highest-capacity models are never the most cost effective.

Sorry, but I think we're looking at 150 TB being "at your local Fry's" more like 2030-2035.

And at this point, we're reaching a point where movies are the only thing that take up tons of space. Like music before, the vast majority of computer users can do without massive amounts of storage. Yes, there will be a market for large drives, always, but very few users nowadays have any true "need" for a 4 TB drive now, a good majority don't even need the more reasonably-priced 2 TB. With 4K+ video being the only major driver I can see for dozen+ TB storage, I just don't see a "home market" for a 150 TB drive even by 2040. (Especially with the move to "cloud storage" of things like music and movies. Thanks to iTunes in the Cloud, my laptop just got to drop 40 GB of locally-stored files. And once I can do the same with all of my movies (not just iTunes-purchased ones,) I will be able to drop another 200 GB.)

The only reason I have 4 TB of total drive space (across three hard drives) on my desktop is because I am a prolific HD home movie filmer - and am terrible at editing them down and deleting the (large) raw footage in a reasonable period of time. If I were simply faster at editing the footage, I could easily work with just 1 TB of storage.

 

[bungiefan89]

Really OEM manufacturers need to drop the 1TB consumer/business desktop and 500GB laptop and replace each with 64GB or 128GB SSD drives. The small minority that actually needs more space can buy a hard drive or BTO it.

I agree with this greatly!
I'm trying to get my father a new Mac to replace the ancient iBook G4 he's been using for two years now. I look to the Mac Mini line and... wow, 250 GB? 500 GB!? My father would NEVER need that much space! It makes me wish they just had something like a 40-60 GB option for storage and then we could save some extra money.

I'm lucky enough to own a top-of-the-line iMac. The thing has a 1TB hard drive, and even with gigabyte after gigabyte of college work, thousands of photos from my new DSLR, more games than I have time to play, AND a large partition set aside for Windows 7 (more games there), my hard drive isn't even half full!

It's insane the amount of storage we have access to these days...

 

[Destroysall]

I personally don't see 3.5 inch drives being around for too long. I think flash drives will become more popular and 2.5 inch drives will replace the 3.5 inch drives.

That's just what I see happening, though.

 

[macuser1232]

I predict that either Mac OS X or Linux or even both will dominate Windows and become more popular and more liked. Hopefully replace

 

[Destroysall]

I predict that either Mac OS X or Linux or even both will dominate Windows and become more popular and more liked. Hopefully replace

Lol, that's a dream. Yet I don't totally see that happening ever (or at least any time soon). Windows is becoming much more better as it progresses. Windows 7 was a revolutionary OS for Microsoft that actually worked well. Not only did it convey properly with PCs and notebooks, but even with mobile phones. Windows 8 is also around the corner, promising an even better experience with Microsoft's OS. Especially with the new and upcoming Metro UI feature. Plus with Windows accompanying the budget side of the home desktop/notebook world, I don't see them being replaced by any company any time soon.

But the future is unpredictable, ain't it?

 

[macuser1232]

Lol, that's a dream. Yet I don't totally see that happening ever (or at least any time soon). Windows is becoming much more better as it progresses. Windows 7 was a revolutionary OS for Microsoft that actually worked well. Not only did it convey properly with PCs and notebooks, but even with mobile phones. Windows 8 is also around the corner, promising an even better experience with Microsoft's OS. Especially with the new and upcoming Metro UI feature. Plus with Windows accompanying the budget side of the home desktop/notebook world, I don't see them being replaced by any company any time soon.

But the future is unpredictable, ain't it?

We'll at the same time Linux is drastically improving! Here pm on your thoughts on why you think Windows is better than OS X. I mean the reason I don't use it is because I do not game on my computer. I game on my xbox 360. Plus a lot of things I do on my mac are what mac's are made to do and are really good at. For example, Video editing, Photography editing, etc. One thing that I am questioning is my ability to program. I am a very avid programmer. I hope that using a mac will not decrease my abilities to program such as programming windows applications/programs. I love my mac and haven't really had any problems with it so far. I hate windows.

 

[Destroysall]

We'll at the same time Linux is drastically improving! Here pm on your thoughts on why you think Windows is better than OS X. I mean the reason I don't use it is because I do not game on my computer. I game on my xbox 360. Plus a lot of things I do on my mac are what mac's are made to do and are really good at. For example, Video editing, Photography editing, etc. One thing that I am questioning is my ability to program. I am a very avid programmer. I hope that using a mac will not decrease my abilities to program such as programming windows applications/programs. I love my mac and haven't really had any problems with it so far. I hate windows.

I'm not hating on OS X. I love it just as much as I love Windows. Plus I totally agree with you on that Macs are perfect for Media Production and that I too game on my Xbox 360.

 

[macuser1232]

I'm not hating on OS X. I love it just as much as I love Windows. Plus I totally agree with you on that Macs are perfect for Media Production and that I too game on my Xbox 360.

ya but they're also good at everything else except for gaming. That's why i have a mac.

 

[Lil Chillbil]

I also think that dyson should pair up with apple and start making bladeless computer fans for macs.

 

[macuser1232]

I also think that dyson should pair up with apple and start making bladeless computer fans for macs.

haha agreed

 

[Dr McKay]

I also think that dyson should pair up with apple and start making bladeless computer fans for macs.

But you can't stick your hand through it and stare in wonder if it's inside the computer

 

[WardC]

The real predictor will be "What will happen with broadband Internet speeds in America by 2020?"

I got my first cable modem in 1997, I was beta testing for the @Home cable internet service, and I was one of the first people in this region to have a cable modem. The download and upload speeds were about 600k/sec up and down.

Today, I still have a cable modem (now with Charter), but the service has not improved that much in a matter of 15 years!!! I am getting about 2MB/sec down now, and 150k/sec uploads. They have raised the download speeds by a factor of about 3x, and decreased the upload speeds by 4x on my service!!

Now, think about it -- in 1997, the fastest Macintosh was the PowerMac 9600/300 -- which was a 300MHz 604e. 2 Gigabyte Hard Drive.

Now we have 4 Terabyte Hard Drives which are 2000 times larger, yet the Broadband Internet connection speeds have not improved much, as a matter of fact in part they have deteriorated due to upload caps. You can't effectively run a server anymore off a cable internet connection.

I seriously doubt we will have "Gigabit ethernet" Internet connection speeds by the year 2020, or the year 2025. We won't have anything like this at all. The only way to have this is through massive fibre-optic networks throughout the country that can handle massive bandwidth.

FIOS is the only thing now close to this, and they are offering 50 Megabit speeds, still nothing close to Gigabit speeds.

I doubt we will have anything comparable to OC-768 for the average citizen by 2025, but that is what we need.

It's not fast enough to stream 4k video, it takes hours to download a 1080p movie, and hours to download large games like Call of Duty, Diable 3, etc. -- and large Application too.

It's simply not acceptable. We should be "There" by now, and we aren't.