Do you think we'll ever use anything larger than an exabyte?

[bob bobato]

I was just looking at wiki articles on the bytes (megas, gigas, petas, etc). Some intresting facts shot up:

...Earlier Berkeley studies estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human-produced information (including all audio, video recordings and text/books) was about 12 exabytes of data.

International Data Corporation estimates that approximately 160 exabytes of digital information were created, captured, and replicated worldwide in 2006

Mark Liberman calculated the storage requirements for all human speech ever spoken at 42 zettabytes

According to IDC, as of 2006 the total amount of digital data in existence was 0.161 zettabytes

One study has predicted that in 2010 the volume of online data accessible either on the Internet or on corporate networks is expected to reach a yottabyte.[2]

Now, people are always going on about how memory and hard drive space is constantly growing and growing... but will it go on for ever? I mean, it can only go so far - could you imagine a hard drive that could hold every single word ever spoken? Could you imagine a program requiring the same amount of space as every video, recording, and book before 1999? Of course not. That's ridiculous, it's impossible (to me, at least). So do you think that we'll ever get to the point where we have zetta and yottabyte- sized hard drives/RAM, or will it just stop growing in after a couple hundred exabytes?

 

[Cutlass]

We will. It will probably be be "super definition" video or something like that that records so much more information than is currently used that even that information storage will be inadequate.

 

[Turner]

I remember when i got a 20 meg hard card. I thought that was all the space in the world. Then, Wow! 500mb hard drives! What are you going to do with all that space?

As we have more space available, we'll figure out how to load it up. It's inevitable.

 

[bob bobato]

I remember when i got a 20 meg hard card. I thought that was all the space in the world. Then, Wow! 500mb hard drives! What are you going to do with all that space?

As we have more space available, we'll figure out how to load it up. It's inevitable.

Yeah, but the difference is, a yottabyte really is all the space info in the world - and more. How would you load up a hard drive that could hold all the information ever created?

 

[Shadylookin]

spread out over all my harddrives I have used approximately a whole terrabyte of space. When I first started using computers. 12 years ago I remember I had a 4gig harddrive and that was considered on the large end for consumers.

As for what we'll fill up a zettabyte with, probably 3D high definition porn

 

[Turner]

Yeah, but the difference is, a yottabyte really is all the space in the world - and more. How would you load up a hard drive that could hold all the information ever created?

No, a yottabyte is not really all the space in the world.

I'm not going to sit here and say "this is what we'll use the space on" because I have as much an idea of that as a frog does about Friday. But I do know that if you build it, they will come. Someone, somewhere, will find something to do with all that space. That, I can guarantee.

 

[taper]

In case anyone's wondering, if something like the holodeck from Star Trek ever becomes real, 34 frames of a 10ft square cube at a reasonable resolution of 1000DPI and using the standard RGB values comes out to 1 exabyte. I'm sure that could be compressed quite a bit, but you see where this is going.

 

[PeteAtoms]

No, a yottabyte is not really all the space in the world.

I'm not going to sit here and say "this is what we'll use the space on" because I have as much an idea of that as a frog does about Friday. But I do know that if you build it, they will come. Someone, somewhere, will find something to do with all that space. That, I can guarantee.

Maybe when they finally finish coding a true "artificially" intelligent being... not being a programmer, I have no idea how big of a program that would be, but it's in the realm of possibility.

 

[Turner]

Dude, I never thought a movie could take up a 43gb hard drive. But that's how big a blu-ray disc is.

I never thought a game could be bigger than a gb. Diablo II Lord of Destruction was more than that. It took up a full fourth of my hard drive in 2001.

If you give a developer a big enough playground, they'll find something to fill it with. Doesn't need to be artificial intelligence. Doesn't mean it won't be that...but I'm sure that our grandkids will be sitting around saying "Only 8YB? You need a bigger hard drive!"

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Perhaps instead of having libraries and archives they'll just move the records and papers and books and stuff to one of these huge hard drives. Instead of having shelves of books there'd be shelves of servers. I wonder how much HDD space the Library of Congress would take up. Maybe not as much as the Internet Archive.

 

[bob bobato]

Perhaps instead of having libraries and archives they'll just move the records and papers and books and stuff to one of these huge hard drives. Instead of having shelves of books there'd be shelves of servers. I wonder how much HDD space the Library of Congress would take up. Maybe not as much as the Internet Archive.

I don't know how much the physical collections hold, but they claim to have 'web captured' 82.6 TBs of data (whatever that means).

I never thought a game could be bigger than a gb. Diablo II Lord of Destruction was more than that. It took up a full fourth of my hard drive in 2001.

How big was your hard drive in 2001? Oh right, 4GBs- then what year was it from?

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Consider that even now, there is the next biggest video resolution already on the horizon (SHV - Super Hi-Vision.) Uncompressed its 24Gbit/s for video and 28Mbit/s for audio. Think of how much space a movie of that res will take.

As someone else said, we'll find a way to fill it up. 2 Years ago I had 160GB of storage space, now Ive got 900GB out of 1.6TB filled. I imagine that if I continue being a pack rat, that will very soon grow to many times that.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

The first hard drive I had was 6 gigabytes (more exact, 6.8 gigs). I was kind of in the technological dark ages so I was very shocked when they came out with 10-gigabyte iPods. And then people called them small!

 

[Cutlass]

The first hard drive I had was 6 gigabytes (more exact, 6.8 gigs). I was kind of in the technological dark ages so I was very shocked when they came out with 10-gigabyte iPods. And then people called them small!

The first hard drive I had was 40 Megabytes.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I have an old Windows for Dummies book that mentioned a 10-megabyte hard drive.

 

[bob bobato]

Consider that even now, there is the next biggest video resolution already on the horizon (SHV - Super Hi-Vision.) Uncompressed its 24Gbit/s for video and 28Mbit/s for audio. Think of how much space a movie of that res will take.

Wonderful, wonderful Wiki says that a 20 broadcast would require 3.5 TB of storage space, so I guess a two-hour movie would require about 21 TB. Which seems very large right now in 2009, but keep in mind that on a 1 Exabyte hard drive, you would be able to hold 47,619 SHD movies.

 

[Mise]

That's in 2 dimensions. Imagine how much space you'd need to hold 3D holograms and whatnot!

One day, we'll have 3D representations that are indistinguishable from real life.

And then we'll add our other senses to the representation -- touch, smell, taste... everything! Imagine how much disk space we'd need for that

and maybe we'll even go beyond what we can naturally sense.......