Hard drive capacities will increase greatly in 2006
The Internet has seen a shift over the last few years and it wasn’t very subtle. “Rich content” was a term that was used in the 1990s to describe Web sites that had audio, video or was built with Flash. Even back then though, the limits on what could be done were very confining.
Today’s Internet is entirely different. Legal music downloads by the millions, podcasting, and video blogging have all become syndicated content. Meaning, not only is rich content being created more than ever before, but its being distributed like email messages. Huge amounts of data are being transferred over the Internets at blazing speeds, which will cause your hard drive to beg for mercy.
We’ve seen the size of standard hard drive installations increase across the board. Every manufacturer has increased the amount of hard disk space you get by default, without an optional upgrade. The optional upgrade offers even more storage space, but even that is proving not to be enough to keep up with your “click happiness”.
Large disk arrays are available for hundreds, not thousands of dollars. External firewire and USB drives with enormous capacity can be bought at just about any computer electronics store. These hard drives will eventually, and I think sooner rather than later, find their way into your computer manufacturer’s default configuration.
It won’t be long until we see what Apple has in store for 2006, and as much as I’d like to start to see them offer 1Gb of RAM in their computers by default, I’d like to see them offer larger disk capacities. My Brother got an iMac G5 right before they moved to the latest revision, but even he has 250Gb pre-installed. That might seem like a massive amount of space to fill, but as digital cameras, bit-rates for audio files, and the quality of distributed video increases, that will seem but a spec of dust soon.
An entire season of LOST downloaded from the iTunes Music Store takes up about 8Gb worth of space on your drive. How many TV show seasons can you download at that rate? I couldn’t fit all too many on my system, that’s for sure.
Computer manufacturers will have to keep up with demand. But you’re probably saying “duh! Colin, we already figured this out”. Well, maybe you have, but I think you will start to be very surprised at the amount of space that Apple will end up putting into their systems soon. They will probably start off making these changes inside of their configurable options on their store. But soon you will start to see sizes that we would have never dreamed of during the rich content days in the 90s.
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international law on September 26th, 2006 9:53 pm
hello
im trying to fix a problem which is, whenever i click internet explorer two pages open at once..one is ok but another is a blank page with microsoft internet explorer written at the top and it keeps pushing to the front all the time.. im running internet explorer 7 with xp sp2..any ideas would be very much appreciated..thankyou
klariska on December 17th, 2006 2:59 pm
Amazing. I heard on the radio this morning that there are all sorts of groups (lots of muslims) freaking out about 24. Understandable, they aren’t exactly sparing exactly sparing to the muslims. What caught me off guard was the idiots that are saying they didn’t like the show because its depiction of the nuke was TOO REAL and was too shocking for TV. Wow… there must be a lot of fat freaky bitch housewives out there with too much time on their hands. It’s a TV show. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it.
Shprotas on January 18th, 2007 4:43 pm