How much electronic-data storage capacity do we need? That's the question even leaders in the storage industry are asking.
Maxtor Corp released a hard-disk drive made for personal computers that has a capacity of 250GB of storage space this week -- that's 20 times the total storage most of us currently have in our computers.
The company also said it was working on a 320GB hard disk for PCs.
"Who actually needs that much amount of storage?" Stephen DiFranco, Maxtor's vice-president of worldwide marketing, said.
History tells us that we will find uses.
"That's what people were thinking 20 years ago when we were talking about megabytes," Brian Ma, an analyst at International Data Corp (IDC) in Singapore told the Taipei Times yesterday. "With all this multimedia, and devices such as digital-video recorders and personal-video recorders, there are certainly applications," he said.
Such data can be stored on hard-disk drives instead of CDs, DVDs or magnetic tape.
A good-quality digital photo, for example, needs 250KB to 1MB of space, and the Philips HDR312 TiVo personal video recorder stores 30 hours of video on one hard disk.
A gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes. A megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes. In other words, one could store 256,000 snapshots on Maxtor's new drive.
"The truth is that what we're doing today more than we've ever done before is storing [data], not creating it," DiFranco said at the VIA Technology Forum in Taipei this week.
The amount of data we store now is greater than at any point in history, he said, adding that we can now record every thought we have.
"Everything lasts for only a moment unless we can store it," DiFranco said.
Storage is a personal thing, DiFranco said, using the example of Jack and Rose in the movie Titanic. When Jack was invited on to the first-class deck after saving Rose's life, the only thing he brought with him was his portfolio of drawings to show "who he was."
"We can now fit our whole lives on a small flash pen," Di Franco said.
A flash pen is a portable storage device about the size of a cigarette lighter with a storage capacity of 128MB.
Corporations also need to store more data. The recent paper-shredding scandals at Andersen Accounting, and the attempts at hiding financial data at Enron have highlighted the need for accessible stored data, DiFranco said.
It is not just individuals and enterprises that need more data. As everyday devices become "smarter," they also need to store more data.
"The car alone will have four or five disk drives in the next five years," DiFranco said.
Last year, Maxtor was second in the world in terms of disk-drive shipments, taking 23 percent of the worldwide market of 196 million units. The figures were published in May this year in an IDC report by storage market analyst, Dave Reinsel. In terms of revenue Maxtor ranked third globally.
Based on the report, Ma said the growth rate for worldwide disk drive shipments would be 9 percent this year. And the demand for larger capacity units is growing.
"Reinsel forecasts a compound growth rate of 12 percent for all sizes of drives through 2006. He expects a fair amount of units in the 200GB-to-300GB range will be sold in this period, with 500GB-plus units to be increasing sold in later years," Ma said.
A 250GB hard disk retails for aboutUS$400 in the US. Such drives will become available in Taiwan within weeks, but Maxtor Asia Pacific was unable to quote a price for the Taiwan market yesterday.
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