

Ask HN: Are we ever going to run out of space? - joshmlewis

Obviously we have data centers that are ridiculously huge and can store crazy amounts of information.  It's kind of like all those major things that may not happen tomorrow but will probably happen soon.<p>On to my questions, if millions of people everyday are pouring information into the web, how does the web get rid of information?  And at what point will we have a space problem because data has to be stored somewhere.  It might be a dumb question because obviously we are good for now, but with more content intensive startups and companies form what does the future look like?  Just curious what you guys think.
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danpat
There is a theoretical maximum information density in the universe, so
eventually, we'll run out.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Limit_on_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Limit_on_information_density)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound>

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dbuizert
We potentially can run out of space, the same way we run out of Oil etc.

But we can go into deeps. The ground is an awesome solution for storing data
and building data centers. Its great for cooling, but bad when the earth does
bad stuff.

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joshmlewis
This is true and I suppose with more virtual space, less physical space we
will be able to store more on less but even then it will be interesting to
see. Do you know of any statistics of common data usage of people?

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icebraining
I don't think we will run out, because if it starts to become scarce, the
price will raise and so people will stop recording _everything_ , or at least
they'll be forced to delete old stuff.

I think eventually we'll have to learn how to do proper data categorization,
adding different levels of priority and assigning expiration dates according
to them.

I have some hope that distributed data technologies based on non-trusted nodes
(Bittorrent and similar being precursors of such) will play a big part on
future data storage, though.

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joshmlewis
Hm, interesting thought. I'm sure there's a startup in there somewhere.
Categorizing and managing data. Because really I don't need that paper I typed
up 2 years ago on how plants grow, but I would like to keep that report I did
on xyz. Having a system to assign certain dates to something...

Interesting thought.

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icebraining
It's not original ;) Content strategy/curation is the new buzzword, but I've
listened to some talks by people involved in those kinds of projects, and they
have interesting thoughts about it.

O'Reilly's page about Data[1] is a nice aggregation of articles and talks
about such problems.

[1]: <http://radar.oreilly.com/data/>

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madhouse
As long as disks can be manufactured, and data centers can be built, we're not
going to run out of storage space.

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petervandijck
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder>

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anon_koder
Until our disks leave no space for food , may be.

