Hard Drive Capacities

Hard drive capacities has been increasing year after year and we are now reaching unprecedented capacities. The question I pose to you is how much space do we really need? My first computer I owned was in 1994. I had a 100mhz computer with 500 MB of disk space with a cost of nearly $3,000. Could you imagine having a hard drive today with 500mb? It did its job back then with only 500MB, but there's no way you could even install an operating system on it today.

6 years later (in 2000) I decided to upgrade my computer storage space. It was a 60GB hard drive that I paid well over 500 dollars for. Yes I know that sounds a bit crazy, but at the time the average disk space was about 10-20 gb, and mine was 3-5 times their capacity. Fast forward to today (another 10 years), you are now able to buy a 1 TB for well under $100. For those that are not tech savvy, 1 terabyte = 1,000 gb.

Do we really need all of this space on our computers? The average computer user will only need a fraction of that capacity and will never even get close to maxing it out. The reason why hard drive space has continually increased is because of the demand for fast broadband speeds. It is now easier to transmit data on the web fast and easy.

Back in 1996, I used AOL for my internet service. One day, I decided to download a file that was roughly 1gb to my hard drive. It was eventually completed but took 24 hours a day for nearly 30 days to finish the download. Compare that to the broadband speeds of today. I am now able to download 1gb file today in less than 1 hour. In additional, watching music videos back then took about 45 minutes to buffer before you could even watch the video. Today, you could just go on YouTube and watch the video as it is streaming in real time. With speeds getting progressively faster and technology increasing rapidly, it was evident that hard drive space needed to be increased.

Music, photos, documents, and especially movies take up a lot of space. Unless new technology surfaces that requires more disk space, I just do not see the need for much further increase in storage capacities. Having huge capacities only creates big headaches. Imagine sorting through 500 TB (500,000 GB) to find one specific picture. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. No, thank you.