i estimated a couple years ago following moores law (pretty reliable thus far) that processor "speed" would top out at 20 ghz by 2012. that said, '"speed" has not been following that, but performance has.
that could be the same with memory, they may get to those sizes, but i'm not seeing huge "speed" increases in the products out there.

wow, the media industry is changing at such a fast rate....it had been pretty much stable from the 1950s to the late 1980s....it's going to be very interesting to see how businesses adapt (or fail to adapt) to the changes in the industry...

I mean, we can see it already...the transition from corporation generated content to user created content is changing consumers' media expectations, and its no secret that the big guys are having trouble dealing with this.

I imagine some people will still "opt" for lower storage, only because it can be a pain to sift and scroll through thousands of different names and titles. I for one can't wait for my 1TB iPod touch. That will be fucking sweet.

i'm still waiting for my 16gb touch. anyone know anyone that found a few that fell off the back of a truck?

she is such and apple fanboy

The problem will remain that 99% of said "content" will be teeny-bopper-crap-rock.

@MRBLAHBLAH - I agree. We're going to see alot of traditional media faltering in the comming years, or at least stumbling around before they devise a new business and delivery model. The ongoing writers strike has revealed some of the cracks in Big Media, and the explosion of user and independently created content will just pound those cracks even wider. There may always be a corporate media, but it's adapt or die time, especially when there's so much cash at stake for keeping a foothold within our ADHD attention spans...

I am still waiting for the price of a 750gb drive to equal 1.5 x the cost of a 500gb drive. My Drobo needs more room.

At the current rate of expansion YouTube will contain more than 376 Billion Trillion videos by the year 2010, but only three of them will be entertaining!!! :-)

Oh I want a Drobo too but with more connectivity (such as Ethernet!) Basically we are all going to NEED Drobos because storage is getting cheaper and cheaper but not more and more reliable!

Why increase the storage capacity when you've got the ever-expanding wireless networks... Although a nice 3.2TB onboard cache would be nice.

@ripfire4: Even as WiFi gets better and more extensive, it's still insufficient when it comes to being consistently accessible in any location and some would prefer to have their data on-board, rather than be stored in some far away server.

What's a "BP"?

University of Houston researchers just released a paper on using 250-nanowatt microlasers to record information to hard disks. Researchers estimated this would allow hard disk capacity to grow to 10TB per square inch, possibly to 50TB per square inch.

And for the rest of you, Moores law applies to transistor count, not HHD capacity. HDD capacity doubles every YEAR, not every 18-months to two years.

2007: 1TB
2008: 2TB
2009: 4TB
2010: 8TB
2011: 16TB
2012: 32TB
2013: 64TB
2014: 128TB
2015: 256TB
2016: 500TB
2017: 1PB
2018: 2PB
2019: 4PB
2020: 8PB
.
.
.

I don't quite see the point, already a 60GB ipod can hold more music than you can listen to sequentially for many years, what good would it do to have all music ever on a device? especially since no matter what your taste is there will always only be a handful of worthwhile songs.

Mark... Pig punch videos? dont you mean DonkeyPunch? ;)

Sukhinder's quote is crap. it's crap because as storage gets cheaper, more stuff gets stored. for example, i have a project that copies/stores about 100 TB a day, and that amount of storage is not cheap, in terms of equipment and power. if TBs didn't exist, then we probably wouldn't even attempt the project, but since they do, we can store and data mine.

you can see this with youtube in a bump-up in video quality. if storage was cheaper and faster, then you-tube videos wouldn't be as grainy.

enterprise storage will always be expensive because companies will always want to store slightly more than the current technology can (easily) handle.

I agree with Drewheyman. I think she just did a Bill Gates "640K ought to be enough" kind of quote. I think content creation is just showing the tip of what it will become.

Does anybody know if there is an estimation formula for content creation, like Moores law for transistors?

I hope that some form of physical media still exists then. I can only imagine the crap that the music will try to pull.

For example:

As portable storage space increases, it will become realistic to encode all of your music at high bitrates, allowing for the best possible listening experience. That being said, music downloads make buying the songs on CD's cheap. You spend $1 per song, making a $15 dollar CD cost around $10. Pretty good deal. But the problem is, the music is encoded in the bitrate that the company decides. That means that while it will be cheap to download music at a low bitrate, high-quality downloads will cost a premium. Suddenly, if you want to download a CD at a high bitrate (which, like I said, will become the norm), it will cost you MORE than buying the actual CD. So eliminating the CD will screw us over by making it cost more to download high quality songs than it would be to buy and encode the CD's ourselves.

This isn't a concern right now because, due to the limitations on capacity, low quality music is the norm. But once that changes, we'll all be suckers.

Hopefully, the prices will change so that high quality music instead costs $1. But then again, since when have companies been on our side? Prices decrease when manufacturing costs decrease. So unless it becomes more cost effective to encode at higher bitrates and download them (meaning broadband speeds will HAVE to increase), the prices won't change. :(

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

@Kaiser-Machead: "Even as WiFi gets better and more extensive, it's still insufficient when it comes to being consistently accessible in any location and some would prefer to have their data on-board, rather than be stored in some far away server."

Ahahah! Oh wow. I gotta save this quote for the next 13 years.

@Kaiser-Machead: The difficulty of sifting through large amounts of data is googles's raison d'etre. Cassidy wasn't there speaking for her health.

Searching for you music on your ipod using Google?..haha wtf is wrong here?

Because we all know that we'll be able to afford "the entire music collection in the world" much less need to store that much on a hand held device.

Yeah it might fit but would you want the home movies of everyone in the world on your Ipod? Want all the music including the genres you don't like, and even then all that info is going to cost something.
Hard drives are so oversized now, how many people fill up a 400gig drive with stuff they use on a regular basis? The problem with drives getting so big is nobody will still backup their data and with more and more getting stuffed on there, the losses will become catastrophic because people will never buy a backup drive.

Storage supply/demand concerns and ways to fill the space aside, the other technical problem with storing the world's music supply on one device would be the tendency of the RIAA to only make available those albums/artists they perceive as bankable at the moment. There are countless albums from the 90s backwards that for one reason or another are unavailable. It's sad, really.

My gandpa used to say, "the room you have, the worthless garbage you'll find to fill it with". A technological visionary and he didn't even know it.

Whatever happened to quality? People are too focused on quantity. How many people have 1,000 or more songs you probably haven't listened to in a year or more? It's the glutinous spirit of American consumerism.