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I am so tired of people, especially people who pretend to be computer experts online, completely failing to understand what Moore’s Law is.
Moore’s Law != “Technology improves over time”
It’s an observation that semiconductor transistor density roughly doubles every ~2 years. That’s it. It doesn’t apply to anything else.
And also for the record, Moore’s Law has been dead for a long time now. Getting large transistor density improvements is hard.
Moore’s law is about circuit density, not about storage, so the premise is invalidated in the first place.
There is research being done into 5D storage crystals, where a disc can theoretically hold up to 360TB of data, but don’t hold your breath about them being available soon.
That would certainly benefit my Plex server setup
This is true, but…
Moore’s Law can be thought of as an observation about the exponential growth of technology power per $ over time. So yeah, not Moore’s Law, but something like it that ordinary people can see evolving right in front of their eyes.
So a $40 Raspberry Pi today runs benchmarks 4.76 times faster than a multimillion dollar Cray supercomputer from 1978. Is that Moore’s Law? No, but the bang/$ curve probably looks similar to it over those 30 years.
You can see a similar curve when you look at data transmission speed and volume per $ over the same time span.
And then for storage. Going from 5 1/4" floppy disks, or effing cassette drives, back on the earliest home computers. Or the round tapes we used to cart around when I started working in the 80’s which had a capacity of around 64KB. To micro SD cards with multi-terabyte capacity today.
Same curve.
Does anybody care whether the storage is a tape, or a platter, or 8 platters, or circuitry? Not for this purpose.
The implication of, “That’s not Moore’s Law”, is that the observation isn’t valid. Which is BS. Everyone understands that that the true wonderment is how your Bang/$ goes up exponentially over time.
Even if you’re technical you have to understand that this factor drives the applications.
Why aren’t we all still walking around with Sony Walkmans? Because small, cheap hard drives enabled the iPod. Why aren’t we all still walking around with iPods? Because cheap data volume and speed enabled streaming services.
While none of this involves counting transistors per inch on a chip, it’s actually more important/interesting than Moore’s Law. Because it speaks to how to the power of the technology available for everyday uses is exploding over time.
Moore’s law factored in cost, not just what was physically possible.
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.
About 5 years ago I pirated all the games ever normally published for my childhood gaming system and my friends different gaming system.
If I went to the past and told that to my younger self and that it all fits in a pinky finger nail sized medium, I wouldn’t have belived me. It’s just so far out there.
Do you have to archive all the porn in the Internet?
“We do these things not because they are easy. But because we are hard!” -JFK
Did I just pave way to the greatest joke today.
We can argue as much as we want about whether moore’s law covers technological development in general or be pedantic like good old fundamental Christians and only read what the words say.
The bigger problem is that we have reached the era of what we could tentatively call “wal s’eroom”. Thanks to enshittification (another one of those slippery words!) I predict that technological progress reverses from now on by 50% every 2 years.
And I was impressed by Seagate launching their Mozaic 3+ 32TB HDDs…
That’s honestly intense. I would be terrified of having that much data in one place
While not hard drives, at $dayjob we bought a new server out with 16 x 64TB nvme drives. We don’t even need the speed of nvme for this machines roll. It was the density that was most appealing.
It feels crazy having a petabytes of storage (albeit with some lost to raid redundancy). Is this what it was like working in tech up till the mid 00s with significant jumps just turning up?
Well hell, it’s not like it’s your money.
This is exactly what it was like, except you didn’t need it as much.
Storage used to cover how much a person needed and maybe 2-8x more, then datasets shot upwards with audio/mp3, then video, then again with Ai.
The size increase in hard drives around that time was insane. Compared to the mid-90’s which was just a decade ago, hard drives capacities increased around 100 times. On average, drive capacities were doubling every year.
Then things slowed down. In the past 20 years, we’ve maybe increased the capacities 30-40 times for hard drives.
Flash memory, on the other hand, is a different story. Sometime around 2002-3 or so I paid something like $45 for my first USB flash drive - a whole 128MB of storage. Today I can buy one that’s literally 1000 times larger, for around a third of that price. (I still have that drive, and it still works too!)
I guess you’re expected to set those up in a RAID 5 or 6 (or similar) setup to have redundancy in case of failure.
Rebuilding after a failure would be a few days of squeaky bum time though.
At raid6, rebuilds are 4.2 roentgens, not great but they’re not horrible. Keep old backups.but the data isn’t irreplaceable.
Raid5 is suicide if you care about your data.
I’m more shocked how little I need extra space!
I’m rocking an ancient 1TB for backups. And my main is a measly 512GB SSD.
But I don’t store movies anymore, because we always find what we want to see online, and I don’t store games I don’t actively use, because they are in my GOG or Steam libraries.
With 1 gigabit per second internet, it only takes a few minutes to download anyways.Come to think of it, my phone has almost as much space for use, with the 512GB internal storage. 😋
Maybe I’m a fringe case IDK. But it’s a long time since storage ceased to be a problem.I download both windows and linux offline installers when I buy games at gog.com, it’s one of the reasons I buy there.
I can understand that having your own copy is nice, especially if the service is closed for some reason.
I just don’t bother doing that anymore, I prefer browsing my library on GOG instead of a file-manager.
2028: ~363TB 2029: ~439TB 2030: ~531TB
This is what I came up with.
Source?
Data from various searches,
https://www.oceanclub.org/h5_en/post/info/id/1545 https://www.thestack.technology/the-evolution-of-storage-alex-mcmullan-pure-storage/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/08/16/the-128tb-ssd/ https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20240913-12303.html
I guesstimated a ~20% growth rate
This was just mental guess work. I’m not claiming I know.
Just attempting to format those in a more readable way.
