timw

This is an article I wrote back in 2004. Although slightly outdated, still an enjoyable and applicable read:

A Gigabyte is like that spare copper at the bottom of our bags, we don’t want it. What I want is terabytes and petabytes and zettabytes and brontobytes. But, how much storage is enough?

When do we hit the point where we have too much memory? Does having too much storage space on a gadget exist? Not so long ago, I purchased and treasured my little 32MB Yepp MP3 player; a little beast capable of carrying half a dozen tracks. Obviously, choosing which tracks got the privilege of sitting on my MP3 player was complicated business.

Around that time came the sexy first generation iPod. In comparison to my little beast, this was a giant. Within it held the ability to store 5GB worth of stuff. Enough to crush and destroy all my old cassettes and MD’s, and let’s not forget, my humble 32MB MP3 Player. Back then, I didn’t even have enough songs to fill up 500MB, especially when MP3s averaged at 64kbps, let alone 5000. My music library was in its childhood, only time would tell how great it would grow.

Push forward to 2004 – and 5GB is nothing. A mere 100 album’s worth of storage is considered child’s play, which just proves we want more – and when we get more, we’ll want even more.

There is an entire universe worth of data out there today, and we can stick our hands into it easier than before. We have much more than our select library of CDs and DVDs to store. Millions of songs and movies are now available through the internet and peer-to-peer file (P2P) sharing. Our appetite for each and every one of these files just got bigger. Applications such as the growingly popular BitTorrent are making the download process of such files even faster. BitTorrent shares the file you are downloading, whilst you are downloading. This normally allows you to get the file you want faster because you are downloading at the combined bandwidth of everyone else uploading; this being the basic concept of P2P file sharing.

Surprisingly, it’s not the handful of suspects you’d expect causing all the chaos. A survey carried out recently showed that 75% of European broadband subscribers use P2P networks every month. The survey also showed that over 35 million Europeans have downloaded music from such P2P networks. If you thought that was interesting, hear this – the total population logged onto any major P2P network, at any given time pumps up to roughly 8 million, sharing over 10 million GB in data. With such numbers in mind, it’s not hard to recognize why Apple’s Mini iPod (with 5GB) is just not enough for most consumers. Their MP3 (or any other audio format) libraries are growing real fast. Can producers keep up?

Similar to how megabyte machines pushed out for gigabyte machines, the gigabyte will soon become zilch in our minds. Bring in the terabytes! A terabyte is equivalent to 1000 gigs, and before you know it, it will be on every gadget-lover’s mind.
Taiwanese manufacturers are supposedly launching a new memory card format that has a big enough stomach to swallow two terabytes of data. Alongside this, researchers at London’s Imperial College are developing ways to store 1TB worth of data on DVDs. Just one of these disks could hold every single episode of The Simpsons (plus commercials).
If you think terabytes are pretty big, maybe you should consider a petabyte; 1000 terabytes. Hitachi Data Systems already has a product called the Universal Storage Platform, which can support up to 32 petabytes of storage. If all this technical gibberish is confusing you, picture the ability to store 7 billion MP3s (assuming an average MP3 file is 5MB in size). Now, that’s one load of songs to have in your library. If you’re not so much a music fan, you can store 49 million movies, if they are encoded to approximately 700MB, in DivX for example. If these numbers still don’t clear up your mind, the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) currently has a catalog of 411,547 movies (at time of writing). Obviously, such a product is not designed for the average home user. A professional set-up with this amount of storage will knock you down roughly one million US dollars.

Let’s look beyond the ever-powerful MP3. There’s a sexy new generation of portable media players, such as Creative’s Portable Media Center. Such a device shows that we don’t only want music on the move. So why stop at music, when there’s plenty of space for movies? In fact, why stop at movies when we can store our entire life’s worth of work and entertainment, on one marvelous device? By then, there will be no need for shoeboxes full of photographs, CDs and DVDs in our attic. We can find other ways to fill up that space.

If there’s one thing I learnt in my life long interest in gadgets, it’s that what we have now is never enough to satisfy us. We’ll always find ways of filling up the space available to us, however big that space is. So, when do you think that brontobyte iPod is coming out?