Will we be using petabyte-sized devices in the year 2020?

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I’m working on the second half of my 10 Top Tweaks for Windows Vista series over at ZDNet (Part 1 is here), and in the course of my research I saw this screen, which contains help text for the vssadmin resize shadowstorage utility:

image

The text that caught my eye was this syntax note:

MaxSizeSpec must be 300MB or greater and accepts the following suffixes: KB, MB, GB, TB, PB and EB.  Also, B, K, M, G, T, P, and E are acceptable suffixes.  If a suffix is not supplied, MaxSizeSpec is in bytes.

Given current storage media sizes, it’s perfectly reasonable that kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and even terabytes are acceptable units of measure for specifying how much System Restore space should be set aside. But whoever is designing the file system here is thinking way, way, way ahead. Those last two units of measurement (PB or P, EB or E) represent values in petabytes (1000 terabytes) and exabytes (1000 petabytes). If past trends in storage continue, we’ll be able to buy cheap petabyte drives in roughly 15 years. It’s hard to imagine setting aside more than 1000 terabytes for shadow copies, but then again who would have imagined, when Windows 3.0 came out in the early 1990s, that a 1-TB hard drive would cost around $100 in inflation-adjusted dollars 15 years later?

So how long do you think it will be until personal storage devices hit the petabyte range? Exabytes? Think this code or some variation of it will be in Windows 2020?

Published by Ed Bott

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8 thoughts on “Will we be using petabyte-sized devices in the year 2020?”

  1. What I’m wondering about is whether or not we’ll see some kind of intelligent volume management that will make the size of any one volume not as important. We have this to a degree right now, but it doesn’t feel like it’s presented to the user in a very friendly way.

  2. Good question, Ed. I wrote some related thoughts:

    http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/06/petabyte_storag.html

    Of course, I dodged your original question about when the magic threshold would be crossed. 🙂

    I just can’t imagine what a pain it would be to manage that much space as a standard NTFS volume or collection of volumes. Ugh.

    Occasionally I’ll see some article that talks about a new storage technology that gives us massively higher densities than rotating mass storage. Who knows, if any of them can get off the ground we won’t need to wait 15 years for disk drives to improve capacity.

  3. Occasionally I’ll see some article that talks about a new storage technology that gives us massively higher densities than rotating mass storage.

    Ah, yes, we’ve been hearing about holographic cubes that fit in your hand and can contain everything that has ever been written or photographed or filmed. The story even got a revival this year, but it seems to be on the list (with flying cars) of things we were supposed to get in the 21st Century that haven’t showed up yet.

  4. Well, I think that NTFS if not NT (not that there is anything wrong with NT, but I certainly hope that they have the Microkernal down by 2020) will be replaced by 2020, but MS will probably migrate some code from those projects. Who knows? Thats a dozen years away.

  5. The answer all depends on where technology goes… obviously high definition video and photos increased the need for larger hard drives, but will those “needs” grow exponentially? I’m not sure. I’m not sure we’ll ever need a 19,200×12,000 resolution video but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. If/when it does, and it becomes mainstream, then the higher demand will make it cheaper and easier to make.

    Also, it depends on the dominant market-leaders such as Microsoft. I don’t know about you but I didn’t really notice RAM becoming so easily and cheap until Vista came out… supply and demand!

    So to answer your question……. I can’t really answer your question 😐

    … but if in 10 years we have Super Blue-Ray, 50 MP digital cameras for $200 and Windows 8 that requires 20GB

  6. !@#$@#$@

    What are the chances of accidentally hitting ‘Tab’ and then ‘Enter’ at the same time?

    Where was I? Oh, yes…

    but if in 10 years we have Super Blue-Ray, 50 MP digital cameras for $200 and Windows 8 that requires 20GB of ram and 200GB of hard drive space just to store Windows………… then I say 10 years 😉

  7. So how long do you think it will be until personal storage devices hit the petabyte range? Exabytes?

    When a Windows install takes that much room!

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