Upcoming games that makes me glad I'm a species born with opposabl

[Lissa]

Thinking more about the issue of the next generation of storage has me torn. On one hand I think a lot of technology (science for that matter) is done for the sake of science alone. But on the other hand, more often than not its necessity that lights the fire that makes technology spill into the main stream. But in this case, really where is the fire?

I'm sure I'll be looking back at this post sooner than I expect and thinking, god did I really say that? But here goes:

What real market is there going to be for large capacity discs in the foreseeable future? 100+ Gig video games are possible if you bump texture quality higher, but there's still significant bottle necks to displaying all those textures at once. The hardware bottlenecks that aren't likely to resolve themselves before more space is needed. 100+ gig movies? Hrm. Not until 'high def' goes through the roof. The only market I can see is for TV series to be released on one disc. Putting all seasons of Seinfeld on one disc would certainly call for some monstrous storage.

Internal HD's are already at 1TB (what are they up to now, +200 gig plus single platters?). Solid State drives promise more reliable backup than their spinning counterparts, and better long term storage than plastic cds/dvds/hddvds/blu-rays.

All of this is to say, I give up on speculating on the future technology. I don't think the need for a new data storage type will come soon enough, and with the fast (and set-back haunted) pace of technology these days the next true storage may be something entirely incomprehensible to me at this date.

Cheers,

Munk

PS. I'm getting old - I still can't get over how cool the idea of a blue laser is!:P

I think part of the problem is you're looking specifically at the home market. Data warehousing is starting to really take off in business. In order to have a good data warehouse you need space, lots of it. This is why things like SANs, NAS, and DAS have taken off (espeically SAN). As various business applications get more and more intricate, the need for more space becomes apparent (I've worked with SQL databases that were growing at 500% per year after routine compression done daily and sometimes hourly). While the general home user may not need this kind of space, business are screaming for it to try and keep down the foot print of their equipment in their data centers (along with the operating costs as less equipment requires less power, less personnel, and less maintenance).