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Hard drives predicting future of computing?


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I bought a 120GB external drive about four months ago. It was about $100. I just got a buy.com email. $100 will get you a 7200rpm 500GB! For $270, you can get a 1TB.

 

Just curious where this is heading. If you were to buy a laptop today with, say, 2GB RAM and 120GB hard drive, I wonder if that will even be functional in, say, five years. Where are we headed?

 

And what's weird is that, to me, I can't see why the average person would need anything more than about 40GB and 512MB RAM.

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I bought a 120GB external drive about four months ago. It was about $100. I just got a buy.com email. $100 will get you a 7200rpm 500GB! For $270, you can get a 1TB.


Just curious where this is heading. If you were to buy a laptop today with, say, 2GB RAM and 120GB hard drive, I wonder if that will even be functional in, say, five years. Where are we headed?


And what's weird is that, to me, I can't see why the average person would need anything more than about 40GB and 512MB RAM.

 

Yo, Mr. Bill Gates once said why would any body need more then 64k ram?

 

Software a the future gonna make 120gb drive an 2gb ram seem as small as 64k ram seem today.

 

The word is EVOLUTION.

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As someone who works with audio and video, those files take up a lot of space. Just did a video shoot with four reels of mini DV tape, and it requires about 50GB of storage for that one project. After NAMM, I had about 14 tapes -- about 170GB. Then take into account room for edited versions and backup...no wonder I just bought two 500GB USB2 drives (one for $139 and two weeks later, the same drive for $99)!

 

As to RAM, more RAM = more samples stored in RAM rather than being streamed from hard drive.

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And what's weird is that, to me, I can't see why the average person would need anything more than about 40GB and 512MB RAM.

 

 

If all you do is email and surf the net you could get by with next to nothing for a computer.

 

If you want to keep a lot of music or video on your computer you will need much more than a 40GB hard drive.

 

If you want to edit video or do multitrack audio recording you will probably need much more than 512MB of RAM.

 

 

 

It'a all a matter of what you do with your computer.

 

I agree with you however that there are probably a lot of average people out there lately who have much more computer power than they really have use for.

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I agree with you however that there are probably a lot of average people out there lately who have much more computer power than they really have use for.

 

 

I think that's true for the average computer used in a business environment. But for home computers, games take up a huge amount of resources, and people are saving videos and audio...for example, I think it's consumers who are driving the market for ultra-high performance video cards for games.

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it's no different than how things have been proceeding since the beginning of PCs. in some ways, five year old computers will be obsolete, maybe due to the amount of ram or hard drive. but for hard drives, someone can definitely get by on a 10 GB drive, these days. even for use in a home studio, 10 GB could be good for a primary drive. it's just like you said, what the "average person" needs, isn't the maximum available. but maybe what the average person will need in 5 years might be the maximum available now.

 

anyway, with usb/firewire, i'd say hard drives will be easily upgradeable for a while on any current computer. many computers are more constrained by the RAM upgrades, since there are only a few slots to fill, but there's usually some expandability. considering that, other factors will more likely make a computer "obsolete". like cpu or video card in a laptop.

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When PMI had a sale last year I bought their Piano Magic collection which consist of most all of their sampled pianos. I believe it is 10 DvD's and some of that is compressed. I recently spent an entire evening installing that on my new Mac. That is just one sample collection from one company. By the time I add an orchestra collection, a few drum ROMplers with expansions, and my regular software ROMplers I have no hope for getting everything in even a large laptop internal HD. Between Apple and SoundsOnline I have 6 DvD's of Apple loops. Oh, and then there is the Kontakt player instruments. It just keeps going and going and going. :eek:

 

That is why my MacBookPro has a couple external 500 Gig Firewire 800 drives, and my MacPro has 4x500 Gig internal drives and a couple external drives.

 

You know what they say about closet space or a basement. ... :rolleyes:

 

Robert

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As to RAM, more RAM = more samples stored in RAM rather than being streamed from hard drive.

 

That's the way it is for now (btw, to the gentleman with the macbook pro and the macpro, I can only say "wow."), but did you hear the announcement today that Intel and others are collaborating on Nand drives, or flash memory drives that will one day take the place of those spinning platters in our computers now. Under this new paradigm, computers will save power and perform much faster (can you picture Reason having audio in? :D )

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I think it's kind of interesting how much of "popular computing" (for lack of a better term, bear with me) has really become communication as opposed to computation as such

 

I mean, on a high level, operation is often representational - "dispaly the data" - as opposed to "transform/distill information from the data"

I mean, yes, there can be some big calcs going on to achieve some flexibility, but then again my distributor cap is a mechanical computer...and I don't think many would say "oh hes computing" as I drive ;)

 

kinda reminds me of the joke "On a cellular lebel, Im actually quite busy!"

 

I mean what we are talking about here seems mainly to be data storage as opposed to computation

 

ever notice that a lot of folks consider their computer non-functional if it is not networked? their "system" functionally includes meta-memory like the internet

 

I guess that does bring up the storage abstraction thing where we have various forms of cooperative and remote storage

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I bought a 120GB external drive about four months ago. It was about $100. I just got a buy.com email. $100 will get you a 7200rpm 500GB! For $270, you can get a 1TB.

 

 

somewhere around the house, I have a clipping of the big news

'a FUL 8K in ONLY a 3ft cube of mag-core memory!!!'

 

Just curious where this is heading. If you were to buy a laptop today with, say, 2GB RAM and 120GB hard drive, I wonder if that will even be functional in, say, five years. Where are we headed?

 

 

It can depend on what you mean by "functional"

- for tax depreciation purposes, a computers lifetime is 5 years.

- does it need to be able to install "all the latest versions" to be considered functional?

- Does it just need to operate as per the environment "when new"?

 

I mean I know some labs that still have Apple IIs running some equipment and the box Im typing this on is sub 1ghz, maybe 20 GB HDD, Win2K

 

but, at the same time, its sitting next to a 3+Ghz, 400 GB, multi-OS system [and it wouldn't impress anyone, its just "pleasantly contemporary"]

 

all of em "function" depending on what you want to do

 

 

 

And what's weird is that, to me, I can't see why the average person would need anything more than about 40GB and 512MB RAM.

 

Probably for the reasons the guys mentioned (I like the closet space analogy), and the avg user may actually have more demands than the specialist (I, for instance, can take or leave GUIs -- and certainly can do without "pretties" in my GUI)

 

here's a fun perspective trip! -- the max std Atari 2600 cartridge memory...4K

 

bet you have emails bigger than that!

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There is no question that consumer usage of video, and the adjustment need to handle better quality video are driving the evolution. While audio is taking up more space, for most practical purposes, it is far more simple medium than video. Just as the audio quality for broadcast has been develop to its max potential, (or at least as far as it is profitable to max out. God only knows if there will ever be a DAB or HD Radio push in this country). Video, however has not be pushed to the max in quality. Look how much better quality HD is from the previous model. To get more qulaity takes more space. In addition the average consumer is all over video. It is in the schools, at home, and on the news. A simple 3 minute high student english project video takes at least 25GB of space to edit the parts et al. If you only have an 40GB HD that takes over half of it. The standard today was 512M-1G Ram and 80GB HD. Now that Vista is out that needs to increase considerably.

 

Will this evolution ever stop. Eventually yes. There was a slow down in computers. It lasted about four years and now it is booming again. It will continue until technology has caught up with the demand and then it will slow down.

 

As for obsolete computeres. I am using a 4-5 year old P4 286Ghz laptop. I have increase the DDR ram to 2G and use a firewire 250GB HD. It has an 80GB internal HD. It is running XP. It works perfectly fine and does everything that I need it to do. It is by no means obsolete. As long as it does that, I will not need another computer. I will bet that it will last another 5 years.

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The new wave of portable HDD-based Multimedia Players

such as the Mvix is another area which is driving the demand

for bigger & bigger HDDs.

These babies are like the missing link between PC and Widescreen TV.

They play all formats without the need to burn to CD/DVD.

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I think its pretty obvious that increased computer power and increased storage is leading to AI that closer mimics reality.

 

I've seen that now somebody has come up with these good sized touch screens that leave visual traces of where you move your fingers across it. In time they will be controllers for softsynths, mixers, etc., and instead of video you'll have ultra high def virtual reality. Maybe that's what we really are.

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You get much more mileage out of an older computer today than an older computer ten years ago. I remember seeing a few people trying to put Win95 on their 386.....it wasn't happening.

 

I last upgraded my Mobo and CPU and RAM about 4 years ago. I replaced a couple of dying hard drives since then. My computer still runs great I can't imagine buying anything new right now.

Let the cutting-edge guys pay the bills and deal with the bugs.

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