I haven't recently spoken about storage in this space. The David Morgenstern's story, "What Killed the Megabytes?," is exactly what I needed to come back to this subject.
Here are some selected excerpts.
Consider the phrase: "price per megabyte." Now this usage is common parlance in our industry, it's found in most presentations that discuss the relative cost of capacity. A quick Google search uncovered plenty of hits to recently authored articles on the relative merits of hard disk storage figuring the cost per megabyte.
The only problem: what's a megabyte? Especially for rotating memory. A child using a computer today could be hard-pressed to find something in the megabyte range in his or her machine, even in the RAM department.
After looking at current gigabyte devices, Morgenstern looks at terabytes. To get a terabyte today, you just need a couple of drives. He concludes.
So get used to terabytes while you can. Petabytes will be the next capacity point scheduled to come down to earth.
I agree with him. Consider this prediction from Adam Couture, an analyst at Gartner, reported by CIO Magazine in "What Elephant? Storage is already as big as an elephant and getting bigger" on May 15, 2002: "The worldwide storage capacity will increase from 283,000 terabytes in 2000 to more than 5 million terabytes by 2005."
And please take a look at "Discover the Petabyte CIO" for another confirmation about the petabyte's arrival.
Source: David Morgenstern, Ziff Davis Media StorageSupersite, January 23, 2003
11:54:08 AM
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