I predict Holographic Data Storage will be the final evolution of data storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
I predict Holographic Data Storage will be the final evolution of data storage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage
The reasaon for the slowdown is because the problem has stopped being about engineering and is now about physics. Sectors have become so tight onto HDD it's getting finicky to make them work and keep writting and reading and stuff like EM interference and even cosmic rays are playing a part.
It's why tapes have had a comeback with LTO format, as the advances of HDD engineering can be applied to tapes but weren't till now. Sadly tapes are pretty slow due to again physics as you can only spin a strip of plastic with chemicals on it so fast before you strat risking it tearing the fuck up.
Now imagine programmers still had to optimize their code like before.
Cpu's and hdd's make it so easy to not care. A graphics driver shouldn't be 300MB. Not even with utilities. Looking at you nVidia.
Can confirm, my first HDD was 80 MB.
the damn curve is flatting down and i dont like it !
This chart mirrors what I have felt, that HDD size increase has slowed way down.
We had a 500 mbyte in our win 3.11 box in 94. 2004 I think I had an 80gb
SSDs are already at 100TB at datacenters type stuff. expensive as f*** but it exists.
Samsung revealed 256TB SSDs for datacenters for next year...
What isn't shown in the chart is the price for larger drives. We've had prices in the thousands (discussing dollars), then in the hundreds, then the HUGE difference was made from the crisis started at the end of 2011, when we started with 2TBs going towards 25/TB (ok, usually 30+ but in any case way under 100 for a 2TB drive). The prices went up and then barely recovered. Not only the maximum capacity didn't increase too fast but also the price per TB didn't decrease much. We aren't nitpicking here that it's between 25/TB and 15/TB or 35 and 12.5, we're talking orders of magnitude like it was the case for these intervals before. There isn't anything worth mentioning into double digits anymore (spinning drives under $100). And it isn't that there wasn't inflation in the 80s, 90s and 2000s, this thing with nearly zero inflation was just some part of 2010s.
There are people even now (well, as of yesterday) in this sub that would recommend 4TB spinning drives for 135 Euros. That is when you can have SSDs at around 150 with the right sale (a little under even if accept Samsung's QLC, which is fine).
Prior to 2011 the trend was for GB/dollar to double very 14 months. (source mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte)
Post 2011 the trend is for GB/dollar to double every... 10 years maybe.
The HDD market went to shit due to mergers and price-fixing.