Possibly. Commodity storage has multiplied by more than the order of a thousand in the last 30 years (from less than 1Mb on floppies, around the 100K or 200K mark each IIRC with a person owning just a few, to a 2Tb drive being affordable). As SSDs progressively replace spinning disks the size of such a device will not be an issue, and we'll find ways to make use of the space easily (wall-size TVs playing uncompressed high-DPI high-framerate video? Whole-life recording?).
I think the future is in the cloud. I just recently got a new laptop with a 750GB HD and I thought to myself "How am I ever going to fill this thing?" Other than my music collection pretty much everything else that I do is or can be web-based.
Maybe Larry Ellison was right about thin clients/NCs, just way too early.
I was thinking the same thing some 15 years ago when I bought ny first 750Mb hard-disk. Some things will never change and the disks will allways end up filled. :)
It depends if the exponential improvement in storage or chip technologies will stop before it's possible.
If we look at history , there were many exponentially improving technologies(for example speed of flight or height of buildings). But the trend stopped when it became to expensive to continue developing the technology.There is also a case to be made for physical barriers to a technology.
With chip manufacturing plants costing $3 billion , and only 3 chip leading edge manufacturers still operating today, and the element size of modern chips is a few atoms (and element size of an atom seems like a hard natural barrier), you could see moore's law stopping.
And even if we can build this storage device, will people want it in 2040 ?
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I'm curious: Does anyone here expect that a 1 petabyte device will be a commodity consumer device in 30 years?
Possibly. Commodity storage has multiplied by more than the order of a thousand in the last 30 years (from less than 1Mb on floppies, around the 100K or 200K mark each IIRC with a person owning just a few, to a 2Tb drive being affordable). As SSDs progressively replace spinning disks the size of such a device will not be an issue, and we'll find ways to make use of the space easily (wall-size TVs playing uncompressed high-DPI high-framerate video? Whole-life recording?).
I think the future is in the cloud. I just recently got a new laptop with a 750GB HD and I thought to myself "How am I ever going to fill this thing?" Other than my music collection pretty much everything else that I do is or can be web-based.
Maybe Larry Ellison was right about thin clients/NCs, just way too early.
I was thinking the same thing some 15 years ago when I bought ny first 750Mb hard-disk. Some things will never change and the disks will allways end up filled. :)
I thought the same when I got my very first HD... 20M.
I remember when a 5MB hard drive peripheral card was an exotic and expensive high-end device.
It depends if the exponential improvement in storage or chip technologies will stop before it's possible.
If we look at history , there were many exponentially improving technologies(for example speed of flight or height of buildings). But the trend stopped when it became to expensive to continue developing the technology.There is also a case to be made for physical barriers to a technology.
With chip manufacturing plants costing $3 billion , and only 3 chip leading edge manufacturers still operating today, and the element size of modern chips is a few atoms (and element size of an atom seems like a hard natural barrier), you could see moore's law stopping.
And even if we can build this storage device, will people want it in 2040 ?