It still amazes me how fast the cost of hard drive storage continues to fall. These days you can pick up — with rebates — 250gb internal IDE hard drives for $70 or so. Grab four, and you’ve got yourself a full terabyte for less than $300.
Internal 500gb hard drives have recently appeared on the scene, and go for a premium so they’re still about $350-$375 for the internal versions. Presumably, those will be down in the $175-200 range by this time next year when, hopefully, we’ll be seeing companies releasing 750gb and 1 TB internal drives.
A lot of cool things start becoming possible as storage keeps falling to such low prices. For example, I’ve probably got about 1,000 movies on DVD — in other words, I have a video collection that is completely unmanageable for the most part. What I’d much rather do is have all of that video on a hard drive setup and manage my videos with something like SageTV.
That’s about 10TB of storage, though, and even if I used just 250gb internal drives (which would just not work), we’re looking at $3,000 dollars. I’m just not going to do that. But what happens when I can get that 10TB with just 4-5 drives and at, say, $500? Huge multimedia archives become cheap — and Hollywood really starts freaking out.
For awhile — and still today — one refrain against this sort of archive was that tools to manage it simply were non-existent. But in a case of “build it and they will come” as storage has increased, there has been a financial incentive for companies to build software and devices to better manage that storage.
MP3s are an obvious case. Once upon a time I had about 1,000 CDs and a couple CD players and I could never find the exact song I wanted to listen to. Keeping the CDs organized was a pain, and even when they were organized that didn’t mean I could remember what group or singer performed a song I wanted to listen to now, much less which CD the song appeared on.
Today, I have about 2,000 CDs worth of MP3s, and iTunes has made finding the music I want to listen to now a piece of cake. When I just had CDs I felt like I had way too much music. With MP3s and iTunes I feel like I never have enough.
Similar systems for video are already appearing. Software like SageTV and consumer electronics devices such as the Tivo show how large amounts of video can be organized, sorted and selected without overwhelming the user.
The only big problem remaining will be how to back up such huge amounts of data.