
The evolution of hard drives  - wglb
http://www.macworld.com/article/156758/2010/12/harddriveevolution.html?lsrc=rss_news
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iwwr
It looks like hard disks are going to stay for a couple more years. SSs are
fast, but storage costs are still dropping with magnetic disks.

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ugh
I think that depends on the growth of the data people want to store. I don’t
think the storage needs of many homes grows faster than about 4GB per year
(1000 photos or 80 music albums [0]), at least if nobody in that particular
home is a video enthusiast or an avid PC gamer. A 160GB SSD or even a 120GB
SSD would last such a home many years, probably much longer than the lifetime
of the drive.

I recently de-cluttered my parents’ PC and can say with authority that their
storage needs didn’t grow by more than a gigabyte in the last year. I have the
suspicion that many of those 1TB drives they build in cheap PCs these days are
mostly empty.

[0] Especially photos seem to me to be the one thing that really demands
additional storage and that nearly everyone uses. Documents usually only take
up a few hundred megabyte.

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iwwr
High definition video cameras are proliferating, as well as bandwidth (which
creates a demand for digital downloads). I don't think 160GB would work for
too long in this scenario.

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ugh
If you record video or download video content. Not everyone does. Just because
the iPhone can record 720p footage doesn’t mean everyone uses it. (My parents
never downloaded a video and never recorded a video.)

