How long until a file sizes in TB will be normal?

[SuperCookie78]

How long will do you think it will take for TB to be normal for GB to be the small measurement and PB the big measurement?

[AngryBeaver]

3 minutes ago, SuperCookie78 said:

How long will do you think it will take for TB to be normal for GB to be the small measurement and PB the big measurement?

My guess would be around another 7-10 years

[UnwantedLinks]

judging from how fast technology is evolving, and we already have a petabyte accessible to us, i'd estimate 4-12 years 

[homeap5]

Probably never. File sizes are related to content and biggest files for home use are video files. So even if 8K videos becomes standard, they will need at last 60-80 GB for full movie without big compression.

 

People may want to keep music in wav format or flac, but that second one is standard now and it will not change unless music producers and bands don't want to release 20 hours albums.

 

Look at typical PC - it may have 1TB, 2 or even 4TB drive but for regular home user still 120GB is enough (if someone don't play games). Big drives have very limited target and 1TB drives are with us long time as standard.

[badreg]

Given the trend towards cloud storage, I would say 20 years to never. Even if network capacities can support terabyte sized files, it will never make sense for performance or economics.

 

Aside from niche applications like scientific data sets or ultra high resolution/high bitrate videos, which types of files would even need to be terabyte sized?

[UnwantedLinks]

1 minute ago, homeap5 said:

Probably never. File sizes are related to content and biggest files for home use are video files. So even if 8K videos becomes standard, they will need at last 60-80 GB for full movie without big compression.

 

People may want to keep music in wav format or flac, but that second one is standard now and it will not change unless music producers and bands don't want to release 20 hours albums.

 

Look at typical PC - it may have 1TB, 2 or even 4TB drive but for regular home user still 120GB is enough (if someone don't play games). Big drives have very limited target and 1TB drives are with us long time as standard.

i wouldn't go that far saying "never", we went from kilobytes to gigabytes in a short amount of time, who knows what scientists and engineers could do?, but at the same time, i thought this true, and i assume a solid 15-25 years more before we see a terabyte be the modern standard

[Vishera]

It's impossible to know,

In 2003 the average HDD was 40GB and games were around 500MB for AAA.

So in 16 years the average game size went up by around 100 times (assuming the average AAA game in 2019 is 50GB).

But games today are compressed,for example in Assassin's Creed games each map in the game is compressed inside it's own "forge" file,Resident Evil games have the game assets compressed in pak files etc.

With compression and scaling i had say 7-10 years until the average AAA game will be 100GB,

1TB games will happen in a very long time...

[UnwantedLinks]

4 minutes ago, Vishera said:

It's impossible to know,

In 2003 the average HDD was 40GB and games were around 500MB for AAA.

So in 16 years the average game size went up by around 100 times (assuming the average AAA game in 2019 is 50GB).

But games today are compressed,for example in Assassin's Creed games each map in the game is compressed inside it's own "forge" file,Resident Evil games have the game assets compressed in pak files etc.

With compression and scaling i had say 7-10 years until the average AAA game will be 100GB,

1TB games will happen in a very long time...

7-10 years is a long estimate in my opinion, i mean come on, how can we ignore the fact that scientists and engineers are searching for ways to make dna-based hard drives

[Vishera]

Just now, Vegas Pro said:

7-10 years is a long estimate in my opinion, i mean come on, how can we ignore the fact that scientists and engineers are searching for ways to make dna-based hard drives

Storage doesn't grow on trees,it costs money for both developers and consumers so games are compressed,i had say 3-5 years until 75GB will be the average size of a AAA title.

[homeap5]

I understand that you want to compare old times when capacity grows to modern times. But years ago hard drives was small not because they was big enough for their times. Old computers has limitations and prices was huge for hard drives. Now computers basically can do anything - we mayb watch movies in high resolution instead of crappy animations in 320x240. We can hear normal music instead of chip beep sounds (like in phones - from beeps to normal music as ringtone). But there is nothing beyond that. Everything that was store in analog format, now can be reproduce in digital format. We do not chase for anything anymore - it's not like when people hear first samples on 16bit computers and says "wow, it sounds like real, like tape". Now it's nothing that may surprise anyone. So we have no goal, no another limits that computer should break (if we're taking about data). So no, terabytes as drive capacity will last very long. At least until someone don't figure out how to reproduce whole world in 3d. And even then - data will be downloaded dynamically from servers.

 

Amount of stored data may even shrink. People who collect mp3 albums needs over 100GB of data. Now many people have access to all music they want and program for that needs few GB at most. Rest is streaming.

[SuperCookie78]

2 minutes ago, homeap5 said:

I understand that you want to compare old times when capacity grows to modern times. But years ago hard drives was small not because they was big enough for their times. Old computers has limitations and prices was huge for hard drives. Now computers basically can do anything - we mayb watch movies in high resolution instead of crappy animations in 320x240. We can hear normal music instead of chip beep sounds (like in phones - from beeps to normal music as ringtone). But there is nothing beyond that. Everything that was store in analog format, now can be reproduce in digital format. We do not chase for anything anymore - it's not like when people hear first samples on 16bit computers and says "wow, it sounds like real, like tape". Now it's nothing that may surprise anyone. So we have no goal, no another limits that computer should break (if we're taking about data). So no, terabytes as drive capacity will last very long. At least until someone don't figure out how to reproduce whole world in 3d. And even then - data will be downloaded dynamically from servers.

what about super detailed VR games?

[Mira Yurizaki]

Most files people interact with on a daily basis are still in the megabytes, if not kilobytes, range. The only applications where things are bloating are games and videos, but that's about it.

 

EDIT: I'm discounting the total sizes of databases and what not.

[loculus]

Most files people interact with, like documents, have no need to be nearly so large, and their size hasn't been growing in the last decade or so. There's no need for music to be gigabytes large per file. Configuration files, other things that are basically text don't get bigger.

 

It's not that there can't be TB and let's say PB "files" (raw data for databases get chunked into smaller pieces than that), but many files you measure in KBs or low MBs will still be around.

 

It's basically high-res image (video) type data that is large, plus digital and other transaction / IoT records that take large amounts of space and will keep scaling up. Not everything will.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, SuperCookie78 said:

How long will do you think it will take for TB to be normal for GB to be the small measurement and PB the big measurement?

It may be a while.

 

The average SSD hard drive is 256-512GB, and that size is picked specifically because it's two chips that fit on a 2280 size SSD.

 

The problem with NAND flash is that the smaller the cells get, the less reliable they get. So we may actually get stuck in a 256GB-1TB SSD zone for NVMe drives, and larger drives might only be viable in a physically larger PCB, eg NF1.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12567/hands-on-samsung-nf1-16-tb-ssds

 

Large file sizes right now are generally "disk image"'s, and raw videos, not anything practical that actually needs large memory spaces since they can be spanned across multiple drives.

[jake9000]

8K movies are quoted as being 6000GB for a 90 minute movie. 

This image of the Moon is 960GB and is the 2nd largest panoramic photo in existence. 

You can download all of wikipedia on 226 GiB (only 15 GiB for articles only). 

 

I think the bigger question is not 'when will we get there' but 'what will it even mean to get there.'. Data has to represent something and it really begs the question of what is being captured to produce a file at that size.