Prediction: First Consumer Petabyte Hard Drive?

The first hard drive I owned came with my Amiga 1200, circa 1990. It held 40 megabytes of data, and I believe it was a $500 option. Yes, I said option. The computer happily ran on floppy disks alone, if you so desired. You had to load the OS off of floppy first, then load your programs from other disks. The A1200 came with 2MB of ram, but I loaded it up with an additional 16MB of RAM, costing a healthy $800. That is just sick.

Back to the subject of hard drives. Here is a rough time line for the consumer hard drive. By "consumer", I mean something that fits in a desktop PC form factor that is in the price range for an average consumer.

1980 5MB ~$1,000.00
1992 1GB ~$1,000.00 (1 gigabyte ~ 1000 megabyte)
2007 1TB ~$300.00 (1 terabyte ~ 1000 gigabyte, or 1 million megabyte)
???? 1PB ???? (1 petabyte ~ 1000 terabyte, or 1 million gigabyte)
???? 1EB ???? (1 exabyte ~ 1000 petabyte, or 1 million terabyte)
???? 1ZB ???? (1 zetabyte ~ 1000 exabyte, or 1 million petabyte)
???? 1YB ???? (1 yottabyte ~ 1000 zetabyte, or 1 million exabyte)

The timeline between 5MB and 1GB drives was 12 years.
The timeline between 1GB and 1TB drives was 15 years.
Notice the price drop!

So let's hear the predictions. When will the first consumer-ready petabyte drive be available, and what will the average cost be? How aboute exabyte? Zetabyte? Yottabyte?

A Yottabyte is a tough one to grasp. That is ONE TRILLION terabytes. Do you think storage space, or personal computing as we know it, will end at some point, long before these outrageous sizes are a reality?

If history is any indication, the petabyte drive should arrive in 12-15 years, and average $300 or less. I think it will much sooner, cut that time down to about 8 years. The $300 price is probably close.

I also think solid-state disk storage will become the norm, seeing hard drive platters die like the video tape did.

Build your own $200 PC

I saw the $199 gPC at Wal-Mart, and wondered if I could build a better system for the same cost. So, here goes my attempt. This PC was designed for typical use: email, internet, word processing, etc. This is NOT meant for hard core gaming. I looked for the best bargain for the buck. No junk, just acceptable hardware for the extreme budget in mind.

Everything was put together from Newegg.com. For $203.93 (yes, I went over by a mere 3.93), I ended up with:

2.0GHz AMD Athlon CPU / Motherboard combo ($69.99)
Nvidia GForce 6100 (built into Motherboard)
512MB DDR RAM (2x256) ($29.99)
Black tower case with 430W power supply ($19.99)
160GB IDE hard disk ($45.99)
black keyboard/mouse ($6.99)
20x DVD +/- burner ($27.99)
black speakers (2.99)

All that for $203.93. Not bad!

Here is the parts list:

LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner
Linkworld 3230-02C2222U Black Steel ATX Case 430W PS
EXCELSTOR 160GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive
SpecResearch SP-250 2.0 Speakers
SpecResearch PS/2 Standard Multi-Media Keyboard/Mouse
Kingston 512MB (2 x 256MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM
ECS C51G-M754 A 3200+ AMD Athlon 3200+ 754 NVIDIA GeForce 6100

I could have saved even more by excluding some luxuries such as DVD burning, less hard disk space and less RAM. I did put myself on a budget of $200, so I gave myself the most I could get.

Now lets compare this to the$199 Green PC available at Wal-Mart:

1.5GHz CPU
80GB hard disk
DVD ROM (no DVD burning)
VIA UniChrome Pro
Linux/OpenOffice (you can download for free)
Fax-Modem (who needs that? add $5.99 to my cost if you need it.)

So, it seems my home-build system is faster, has double the hard disk capacity, a DVD burner, and better video capability. Not to mention the Linkworld case looks better, and better built IMHO.

So there you go, build it yourself (or have your kid do it, it's not hard), and you can get a lot more computer for the same cost.