The price of memory devices have been constantly plummeting. The average consumer today expects their smartphone to hold at least 16 GB of memory, the highest storage capacity going up to 128 GB. Laptops today are retailed with storage capacity of upwards of 1TB memory and users still purchase external hard drives upwards of 500 GB to transfer and store additional data. Toshiba had recently announced a 5 TB hard drive for the Enterprise Market. Meanwhile, Seagate has vowed to release a 6 TB hard drive by April 2014 as well. All this while begs the question; are Giant hard drives a luxury or the need of the hour for computing?
The Hunger For Data: To Delete Or Not To Delete?
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We are a Data Hungry people. The average American user consumes more than 1.38 GB data a month on his mobile plan. We can only imagine how much that is on Wifi networks. With the percolation of high speed internet, higher quality pictures, videos and movies and larger games, most users are facing a space crunch. Even the average 1 TB hard drive seem to be used up in under a year. This Hunger is only going to increase further. With the advent of 4K videos and new generation of High Definition Games users are bound to be stuffing their existing hard drives to the brim. Clearly there is no hard drive space enough to satisfy your Data Hunger.
When the existing space gets completely used up most users have only one of 2 choices; to delete or to expand the memory. With countless precious television shows and games on your hard drive the choice to delete may be quiet difficult to make. Even if the average user does in fact manage to sit through his file collection and cull the excess there is no denying the inevitable end to the available storage space.
The Cloud Solution
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The Space crunch and need for easy transferability and access to data has been solved to some extend by Cloud services. All the top companies in the world have invested in some way or other in providing a cloud storage facility. From DropBox, Google Drive to SkyDrive and iCloud users is already familiar with and use some form of Cloud storage service. However even though these cloud storage services provide a great means to transfer data between multiple devices they are limited by smaller storage capacity. Most users get around 20 GB of storage space online. This space is hardly sufficient to store perhaps a few photographs or critical work files. Ironically 20 GB is still quite a lot of Data if used wisely. But just as most users prefer storing their movies and games on their ginormous hard drives so do they prefer carrying all these on the go, just in case.
The Dipping Cost Of Storage
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Memory devices are fast becoming affordable to the masses. Gone are the days when the total memory used by Voyager was less than 64 KB. A look at the external hard disk price list shows just how affordable expandable memory has become for users. A 500 GB hard drive costs $40 (Rs 2500) today, a far cry from the days when the same would’ve cost users close to $80 (Rs 5000). Dipping cost of memory is bound to make 6 TB hard drives and 12 TB hard drives eventually affordable enough for users. When it becomes a choice between deleting your beloved content and expanding there is no doubt that more memory will always be welcome, provided it is affordable.
Hard drives are bound to get bigger and cheaper in the days to come. In the choice between sacrificing precious data and shelling out a bit extra for double the storage space there is little doubt that larger hard drives will win. It is clear that Giant Hard Drives are not only the need of the Hour but a necessity for the times that we live in.