| Hard drive capacities has been increasing year after | | | | the demand for fast broadband speeds. It is now |
| year and we are now reaching unprecedented | | | | easier to transmit data on the web fast and easy. |
| capacities. The question I pose to you is how much | | | | Back in 1996, I used AOL for my internet service. |
| space do we really need? My first computer I owned | | | | One day, I decided to download a file that was |
| was in 1994. I had a 100mhz computer with 500 MB | | | | roughly 1gb to my hard drive. It was eventually |
| of disk space with a cost of nearly $3,000. Could you | | | | completed but took 24 hours a day for nearly 30 |
| imagine having a hard drive today with 500mb? It did | | | | days to finish the download. Compare that to the |
| its job back then with only 500MB, but there's no | | | | broadband speeds of today. I am now able to |
| way you could even install an operating system on it | | | | download 1gb file today in less than 1 hour. In |
| today. | | | | additional, watching music videos back then took |
| 6 years later (in 2000) I decided to upgrade my | | | | about 45 minutes to buffer before you could even |
| computer storage space. It was a 60GB hard drive | | | | watch the video. Today, you could just go on |
| that I paid well over 500 dollars for. Yes I know that | | | | YouTube and watch the video as it is streaming in |
| sounds a bit crazy, but at the time the average disk | | | | real time. With speeds getting progressively faster |
| space was about 10-20 gb, and mine was 3-5 times | | | | and technology increasing rapidly, it was evident that |
| their capacity. Fast forward to today (another 10 | | | | hard drive space needed to be increased. |
| years), you are now able to buy a 1 TB for well | | | | Music, photos, documents, and especially movies take |
| under $100. For those that are not tech savvy, 1 | | | | up a lot of space. Unless new technology surfaces |
| terabyte = 1,000 gb. | | | | that requires more disk space, I just do not see the |
| Do we really need all of this space on our | | | | need for much further increase in storage capacities. |
| computers? The average computer user will only | | | | Having huge capacities only creates big headaches. |
| need a fraction of that capacity and will never even | | | | Imagine sorting through 500 TB (500,000 GB) to find |
| get close to maxing it out. The reason why hard | | | | one specific picture. It's like looking for a needle in a |
| drive space has continually increased is because of | | | | haystack. No, thank you. |