From a New York Times story on the general financial problems of hard drive manufacturers and the recent revival of HD maker Komag,
Moreover, it is still uncertain whether the rate at which storage density is increasing will slip from the staggering pace of recent years. The industry will introduce 60-gigabyte platters in July, and 80-gigabyte surfaces are expected by the end of the first quarter of 2003. Before the end of next year, Komag will almost certainly be shipping disk platters that can store 120 billion bytes of data each.
At some point, analysts and industry executives say, the pace of improvement in the industry will inevitably slow down, but those predictions are not new. For most of a decade, the disk-drive industry has defied technology limits as well as what many have viewed as financial common sense.
Is the demand for hard drive space really slowing down? I don’t think so.
One thing about hard drives is that as hard drive space increases, many applications that were always possible suddenly become much more feasible.
I could certainly use my computer today to store every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that becomes a lot more feasible if I can walk into a computer store and walk out with a 400 gig. hard drive for $300 — or buy a Tivo with a 400 gig HD.
Just as the increasingly large hard drives made MP3 file sharing possible (along with broadband), so I suspect ever huger hard drives will lead to wider adoption of similar technologies for video.
I.e. — Hollywood’s worst nightmare is only 18-24 months away.