His math is a bit off due to confusion over terabytes vs. petabytes, but Peter Van Dijck has an interesting look at just how cheap storage will be if current trends continue (and who knows if they will?)
Van Dijck notes that over the past quarter century the cost/gigabyte of hard drive storage has decline roughly by half each year — sometimes a bit less, sometimes a bit more.
Today a petabyte of IDE hard drives would cost about $10,000. If the cost/gigabyte of HD storage keeps halving each year, on average, then five years from now that same petabyte should retail for a little over $300. Van Dijck actually forecasts much further out to when a petabyte itself will be less than $20, but extrapolating current trends out 15 years is even a bit more than a techno-opitimist like me is willing to do.
On the other hand, if current trends just hold for another 5 years I think the results will be amazing. With a petabyte, you really reach a point where you can begin to think about storing literally everything you could conceivably ever want to store. I’d have no problem filling a terabyte — in fact between my work and personal machines, I’ve got about 1.5 terabytes, with about 50% full. Give me a couple more years and I’ll probably be using 2 or 3 terabytes of storage. But 1,000 terabytes? That might even prove a challenge for me, though I’m sure new applications and higher resolution everything will make it possible (hmmmm…store all digital pictures as 16 megabyte TIFF files instead of compressed 3 or 4 megabyte JPEGS….stop bothering with lossy music formats…)
But one thing is sure — I can hardly wait to get my hand on a cheap petabyte hard drive just to see if I’m up to the challenge.