"Reaction [beta]"
The terabyte hard drive 14 Mar 2007
The terabyte hard drive has arrived. Hitachi will release its Deskstar 7K1000 later this month (priced at $399), with Seagate Technology due to follow suit "very soon".
To put things into context, according to the How Much Information study from UC Berkeley, you'd need about 50,000 trees to create enough paper to hold a terabyte of information - and you could cram the entire print collection in the US Library of Congress onto ten of these drives.
Mass production of these devices will therefore raise some important questions for interaction designers. As Jesse James Garrett points out:
"For the entire history of computing, storage has been a scarce resource, and usage strategies have revolved around that scarcity: How much data to keep? For how long? What to archive, and what to throw away altogether? Now, with desktop storage comfortably outstripping the vast majority of application needs (with the notable exception of digital video) strategies of scarcity start to give way to strategies of abundance.
"In other words: How does using a computer change when nothing ever has to be thrown away? And how does the experience design of software have to change to accommodate that change in usage?"
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4 comments so far
Ed Bryan 14 Mar 2007 11:05 AM
In my opinion this spells the end of the old-school "files and folders" paradigm. The deep hierarchies that this system creates in order to deal with large volumes of information makes finding things impossible.
Joe 15 Mar 2007 09:34 AM
So loads of data can be crammed onto the newest biggest drives... and this will change everything... where have I heard that before? The average size of a piece of typical personal media seems to be growing exponentially too. I have never in my life felt I have enough disk space. I'm sure this will never change.
Personal media is like a gas, it will fill whatever space you give it.
Simon 15 Mar 2007 01:33 PM
@Ed: Yep, I think folders and files will be around for a little while yet, although most operating systems are now experimenting with different (usually search / metadata driven) approaches to overcome the old limitations.
@Joe: I guess it depends - experienced / power computer users will probably always demand more space - especially those working with video. But what about the inexperienced to intermediate users - aka the majority? If all you're doing is creating word docs - a terabyte of space will drastically change your approach to storing and purging the contents of your machine. We've heard from many users who buy a new PC when their old one "gets clogged up". A terabyte drive (and a decent UI onto it) might make them invest in a new PC a lot less regularly.
Brandon 11 Sep 2007 05:48 PM
Ah, the 1 Terabyte hard drive! I can’t say I’d need all of that storage space but I love Seagate">http://www.computergiants.com>Seagate hard drives so this is exciting news for me. I’m betting I can fill at least half of it up with my media, mostly music and some large videos.
I’m wondering how long it will be before they make enclosures for this huge drive? I have several Western Digital hard drives in enclosures but the biggest one is only 300 Gigabytes. I’d love to have a Terabyte’s worth of storage that I could take on the go! Now if only I could get a Terabyte of memory and a Terahertz processor!