Where's my petabyte disk drive? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#81

Post by jfoutz » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 12:10 AM UTC

simcop2387 wrote: post #33

jfoutz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to elaborate a bit, it's pretty easy to keep three copies of stuff you care about. First, you have the working copy, on the machine itself. A big backup disk is pretty straightforward. I use time machine, which isn't super reliable, but it's very very easy. Now, when it comes down to it, do you really need to backup the OS? or your installed software? if the machine and the backups fail, you're going to be reins…

> Now, when it comes down to it, do you really need to backup the OS? or your installed software? if the machine and the backups fail, you're going to be reinstalling anyway (probably) I'd counter this with what I do with my laptop. The OS is considerably smaller than the data I actually care about (<20gb), it takes almost no time to backup and so it leaves me with a very quick ability to restore the system to a know…

Yeah, I was trying to point out you don't really need 3 copies of everything, and really 1 is enough for some stuff that's easy to replace. But the stuff that matters, you should have lots of copies of that. 2 backup disks is another way to go, just swap them, say, weekly. Photos from a once in a lifetime trip? make a bunch of copies, local and remote.

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#82

Post by fdanconia » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 1:10 AM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #55

jsprogrammer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the rate if increase (in density) is slowed by lack of demand for storage?

> lack of demand for storage and in turn, demand for storage is slowed by lack of need for storage. The real question should be: Where's my 4K video? My 10-bit-channel images? My lossless audio? Yes they are here but not nearly as common as content delivered in ancient formats from over a decade ago. For example go on a wallpapers subreddit, the vast majority is still in 8-bit 1920x1080 JPEG. Video is still mostly 10…

>and in turn, demand for storage is slowed by lack of need for storage.

Are you talking about consumer storage? Because need for enterprise storage (which I sell), is only increasing. What is decreasing is the revenue/profit per TB (naturally).

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#83

Post by masterj » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 2:23 AM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #79

douche wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a lot of things, that extra resolution is not really any benefit. Particularly for content that wasn't ever recorded at that level of fidelity anyway - I don't need 4k versions of Seinfeld re-runs, or SpongeBob SquarePants for the kiddos. Most of that stuff doesn't even need to be 720p. Besides, pirated video content was really the only thing that most normal people could fill up their hard drives with (okay, may…

Also people who shoot raw photos. They're like 35MB each, an order of magnitude bigger than jpegs. They can eat up gigabytes (though to be fair, not terabytes) pretty fast. I have about 525GB of photos and videos that I've taken over years. Something like 300GB is jpegs. If I'd exclusively shot raw files I would need 3-4TB to store everything.

And 4TB these days only costs ~$120 http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-SATA-3-5-Inch-Desktop-ST4000DM... though it's still a chore to manage and backup so many photos

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#84

Post by BrainInAJar » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 2:44 AM UTC

Viper007Bond wrote: post #71

digi_owl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall reading some worries that current sizes are already pushing the limits of RAID setups. This in that it takes so much time to rebuild a drive given current interfaces that you risk one of the others in the array to fail during the process, thus making recovery impossible.

My consumer storage RAIDs already take 1-2 days to rebuild. I can't imagine larger enterprise ones!

your consumer storage RAID is a lot dumber than enterprise ones, which can resilver more intelligently

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#85

Post by aaron695 » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 3:34 AM UTC

The concept that a Petabyte is a lot of storage is very strange?

50 gig per hour for a cinema screen quality setup (Most houses in the next 20 years...) would be 20,000 hours of entertainment, meh I might want access to that in a life.

Also remembering we might be heading towards an environment where we record everything at all times.

Certainly currently I'm buying a hard disk every year as quality goes up and it's easier than throwing stuff out.

Closer we get to Petabyte HD the better I say.

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#86

Post by wtbob » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 3:46 AM UTC

msbarnett wrote: post #17

wtbob wrote: post #12

Why did he write '$2\frac{1}{2}$ or $3\frac{1}{2}$' (which presumably uses JavaScript to be rendered), when he could have just written '2½ or 3½'? It'd have taken 8 bytes to store instead of 36 — and that's not even counting the size of the JavaScript! As long as folks keep on reinventing the wheel, only bigger, hard drives are going to have to keep increasing in size.

I'm not sure that using LaTeX markup, a format that predates HTML, counts as "reinventing the wheel".

Oh, I love LaTeX dearly — but it's not part of HTML, and in this instance UTF-8 handles it perfectly well.

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#87

Post by ksec » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 3:56 AM UTC

I often think people are underestimating the demand for storage. Let pick an example, If Apple were to offer free 30GB iCloud Space to every iOS customers. 650 Million customers equals to roughly 20EB of Data, that is 40 Dropbox! Are you will need Multiple copies to safe guard it.

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#88

Post by mchahn » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 4:41 AM UTC

dalke wrote: post #27

evmar wrote: post #9

Massive hard drives only useful for archival purposes, under this argument: if your hard drive is being used for live queries, you want to access all the data on it. Even if you have have all the pieces in place to stream 1gig per sec off of the drive, a 1pb drive would still take 1 million seconds = ~11.5 days to read. So in practice in production it's more useful to have smaller hard drives in more places to work o…

I've toyed with the idea that if you buy a 1PB hard disk it will come pre-loaded with, say, a copy of archive.org and search indices, or a large collection of movies. Also, if everyone had the same reference data set then (handwaving!) it could make for some fantastic compression methods. I don't think the economics works out, since at 1G/s it probably takes too long to load the data, and as this essay points out mos…

> (handwaving!) it could make for some fantastic compression methods.

You could have indexes of hashes and store any chunks of anything in a big flat address space. You wouldn't even need to know what you have. Just a massive amount of archived chunks of storage. (OK, that is more than hand-waving, maybe arm-waving?).

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#89

Post by Paradigma11 » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 4:51 AM UTC

Basically the Internet is my HD now, so i don't see the need to upgrade any time soon.

Re: Where's my petabyte disk drive?

#90

Post by tempestn » Mon, Mar 28, 2016, 7:06 AM UTC

One way you could fill up a hard drive orders of magnitude than the ones we have now is with fully immersive recorded experiences, of which the recent 'holoportation' demo from Microsoft gave an early example. Look at how much space regular ultra-HD video consumes, then imagine further increasing the resolution and recording from not just one viewpoint, but the entire 3D scene.

This is similar to how a cellphone camera of today can shoot video in a single minute that would completely fill hard drives from the 90s. (And even a single high-res image from today's digital cameras is larger than the install size of Windows 3.1.) Back then it would have been difficult to imagine these uses for storage.