Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection

As my life has become increasingly digitized, I’ve found an almost never ending need for more and more storage capacity. Luckily, not only have prices continued to fall over the last few years, but storage capacity has increased as well. No one knows what the future might hold in terms of storage needs, but iTWire is reporting that Seagate is planning to be in front of it and will eventually be offering a 300 TB (yes that’s terabytes!) hard drive by 2010. In order to beef up the capacity from their current hard drive offerings, Seagate will be using heat-assisted magnetic recording technology to increase storage yields.

While a 300 TB drive would be undeniably cool, I can’t help but wonder whether or not 300 TBs might be a a bit of an overkill. Even if you were using the drive to store high definition content, you could still record television 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, using both HDTV tuners on a series 3 TiVo, for over two years before you’d run out of storage capacity.

At this point in my life, I’m pretty satisfied with the amount of storage that I have access to, so it’s hard for me to see how useful an industrial capacity drive like this might be. With 1.5 TBs dedicated to music and photos and another 750GBs dedicated to high def television content, I feel like I have enough storage to last me for wherever the future takes me. At the same time though, it’s hard to know what the future holds when it comes to technology. When I first started digitizing my music collection, I never thought that I’d need more than 100GBs, yet after just a couple of CD ripping sessions, I quickly realized that I was going to need substantially more storage capacity. While 300 TBs seems like a bit of an overkill right now, in retrospect, it was only just a few years ago, that Maxtor was making history by offering a “whopping 100GB” drive that was really just two 50GB drives packaged together.

Update – iTWire updated their original article with a correction saying that Seagate is working on a 300 Terabit hard drive, not terabyte. This translates into 37.5 Terabytes or enough storage to record HDTV content 24 hours a day for 7 months before running out of space.

Posted on January 3rd, 2007 by Davis
Filed under: Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Technology, TiVo