[ChuckMcM]

"If storage prices continue to develop as they have since the 1980s," bzzzt and thanks for playing.

Remember this truism, "In real life, exponentials are s-curves."

That said, there are folks today who record 24x7 stereo 44khz as a 'life diary.' It isn't that hard to store these days and compress down. One could imagine adding video to the mix.

[onebaddude]

>bzzzt and thanks for playing.

There may be tens or hundreds or even thousands of years before that exponential curve looks like an s-curve, making his point more relevant that yours.

[ChuckMcM]

Well I've been pretty involved in storage for the last 10 years, 5 of them at Network Appliance and then later another 4 at Google dealing with their storage scale. And worked with both Seagate, Fujitsu, and to a lesser extent Hitachi as they have worked to increase the density of what can be reliably recalled. More interesting has been watching the struggle of thermal noise and the ability to push past areal densities of 300 - 400 Gbits/inch^2.

There are certainly nano-scale technologies which seek to store information in the 'spin' of electrons (I'd be hard pressed to see you get better than that) but may become impractical if the network bandwidth gets to the point where the size doesn't matter any more. Specifically, what matters to the end consumer is that they can get what they stored into something which can use that information. If it comes from disk across the room that is just as good as a local on board disk if the bandwidth is the same.

The effect this reality is having on storage is that fatter (and increasingly more fragile) drives, are becoming less useful to consumers than larger but more reliable storage attached via a protocol (be it iSCSI, iCloud, S3, or NFS).

So once people are unwilling to pay to carry it around, the ability to recoup your investment in making it possible to carry around a device that can read electron spin is less and less likely. And your s-curve will become clear, when for the last 5 years the drives have all been at most 6 maybe 10TB and the price of those doesn't seem to fall all that much.

I realize disk growth has been phenomenal "your whole life" as CPU performance growth was for most of mine, but CPU performance growth has kinda sputtered big time. We've been multi-coring for a relatively long time now. Storage systems (especially random access read/write systems) are in the same boat. But the glory days are over.

I am curious to see if storage will have its 'multi-core' moment. That will be interesting if it happens.

[mtrimpe]

My bet is still on a break-through in write-once storage, which wouldn't just be useful for life logging but could also work wonders with a storage system like Datomic (with persistent/purely functional data structures.)

[ChuckMcM]

I read an interesting paper in Science about backing up data to DNA as a future archive scenario. At the time I hadn't realized you could just store DNA by drying it out and putting it on an index card, I had visions of cryo vats of test tubes :-). Such a system would be a 'write once' sort of solution.

[mtrimpe]

Indeed. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about, although from what I've heard access times for DNA are still a bit steep though ;)

[onebaddude]

>I am curious to see if storage will have its 'multi-core' moment. That will be interesting if it happens.

Thank you for the insight and explanation.

I suppose I took issue with your above comment as I saw it "missing the point" of the author; if storage capability keeps growing (even +/- its current rate), it will be extremely cheap by modern economic standards to record...everything.

[jerf]

Please compute for me the number of bits per atom you will be storing if current trends continue for a thousand years.

[onebaddude]

Please compute for me when we'll reach the peak of the exponential growth, and move to the "top of the s-curve". I realize it will happen at some point. I don't pretend to know when.

Do you really think it will occur within 10 years, which is what the author uses for his extrapolation in the article, and which would justify the parent commenter implying the back-of-the-envelope calculation is wrong (with a snide comment)?

[jerf]

"I realize it will happen at some point. I don't pretend to know when."

Partial knowledge is possible. We can be quite comfortable ruling out "thousands" of years. It would require a total, utter rewrite of physics. While this can never be 100% ruled out, I do tend to think that when that's your last defense, you've gone too far. If people a thousand years from now look back and laugh at me for thinking that it's impossible to store multiple petabytes on a single hydrogen atom, I hope they'll at least have the courtesy to admit it was by far the most likely hypothesis given the quite substantial amount we know about particle physics right now.