How long do you think it will be before we are talking about computers in exobytes and pentobytes?

Answer 1

Maybe sooner than people think,

External terabyte drives were introduced about 3 years ago by LaCie and other manufacturers. You can get an internal terabyte drive for less than $300 these days from Hitachi and others.

For a petabyte drive .. or 1,000 terabytes ... or 1,000,000 gigabytes ... some inherent limitations in magnetic media need to be overcome, like how densely you can pack charged particles, the ability to read very weak bits, stacking bits vertically in the media, etc. But those will be overcome, one way or another.

Then, with some advances in fields like ferroelectricity, nanotechnology, optical and molecular storage, and even holographic storage, the exabyte drive ... 1,000 petabytes ... 1,000,000 terabytes ... may not be too far behind

It only took a little over 20 years from the time I was stuffing newly released 20MB (yeah, Megabyte) hard drives into PC XT clones to these days when you can get a 1TB (or 1,000,000MB) drive in your desktop.

Storage keeps getting more massive. I know my kids will shake their heads in amazement that my first computer stored it's data on cassette tapes and with capacities of just bytes. Your kids will be amazed that your huge and bulky iPod Nano could only store gigabytes of data.

I really do wonder what's in store next.


[Note: With all due respect to the other answerer, Moore's Law, attributed to Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, is about the number of transistors on integrated circuit chips, like those found in CPU's and is concerned with computational power. It has little, if anything, to do with magnetic storage media. For one associated with magnetic storage, see info on "Kryder's Law" - as in Mark Kryder, founder and director of Carnegie Mellon University's Data Storage Systems Center and Chief Technology Officer at Seagate Technology, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000B0C22-0805-12D8-BDFD83414B7F0000&pageNumber=1&catID=2 ]

Answer 2

Moore's law has been pretty consistant since it was first stated in 1965...it states that storage capacity doubles about once every 24 months (not 18 months, as is commonly claimed). Based on this number, it takes about 20 years for capacity to jump by a factor of 1000.

At the moment 1-terabyte (i.e. 10^12) servers have been around for a few years, so we can realistically expect to see 1-pentabyte (10^15) servers by 2025 and 1-exabyte (10^18) servers by 2045.

Answer 3

Probably at the rate we are going with Blu-ray discs and HD DVD.....I would say about 20 years :) :) Hopelly Sony wont try to fit a game in a exobyte capacity CD 0_o

Answer 4

At the rate it's going, not very long. I think thye make a 750 gig now, so next step up is a terabite on one drive, so probably within the next 10-15 years.

Answer 5

they already make terabyte drives. The answer to your question is" in you lifetime"

Answer 6

say what?