Monday, October 15, 2007, 2:57pm
There's an article on Slashdot about larger harddrives and, as usual, a discussion on how no one needs to store 4TB worth of data. Ignoring that I might want to download and archive a few seasons of my favorite TV show in high definition, a few hundred albums of music and several movies that I like, there's also the issue of user created content.
The average image in my Aperture library, with all of it's support files and previews comes in around 19 megabytes per photo. Assuming I take 100 photos every time I go out to take photos and go out 40 times per year, that means I'm amassing 74.2 gigabytes per year in photos. Add in a vacation every once in a while and some 360 panoramas and I'm easily at 100 gigabytes per year. (I'm assuming that as photos become larger in size, that compression can keep up. I pretty sure it won't.)
In 10 years time, I will have completely filled up the largest harddrive available on the market currently. And I don't even shoot video clips of vacations or family events. I imagine that if everyone had a small camcorder that was synced with a computer much like digital cameras do now, filling up a terabyte harddrive would be even easier, possibly in three years time, maybe even less.
If all you use a computer for is your basic internet threesome (web, email, IM), then yes, a four terabyte harddrive will be overkill for you. So is the latest processor and graphics card. But if you create 100+ gigabytes of multimedia per year, then a four terabyte harddrive (and maybe a second to keep an offiste backup) might be enough to hold onto all of your photos.