Daniel Lemire's blog

, 8 min read

Infinite storage: we are almost there…

11 thoughts on “Infinite storage: we are almost there…”

  1. Tomas says:

    Clearly, you could take advantage of good old memory hierarchies and dump you SD card weekly to your 5TB drive. You can probably afford a $500 SD card once.

    The recording of everything around the car already routinely happens in high-risk places where the cost/benefit ratio favors it, such as around some police cars and in Russia.

  2. Interesting. 10 years is definitely plenty for this to happen, the non-trivial part (if I can call it that) will indeed be the searching algorithms.

  3. Mihai says:

    Your definition of “infinite” seems to be strangely bound by the amount of data collected in *one* year. That appears to be quite shortsighted.

  4. @Mihai

    If, in 2020, you can afford to store everything you see, hear and read on a disk for $50, then you will be able to do the same in 2021 for $25… and so on.

  5. Mihai Christodorescu says:

    @Daniel

    I think the amount of data we want to store grows faster than the storage capacity. Today you can store everything you see, hear, and read (according to your calculations). Tomorrow you will want to store historical analyses of your data (“how often do I check email?”). By next week you will to store comparative analyses of your data and your spouse’s data. By next month, you will need to store historical analyses of your comparative analyses. And so on…

  6. Joshua Brulé says:

    I suspect that we will start demanding higher resolution video as storage gets cheaper (although this will be bounded by the human eye’s ability to resolve pixels). We’ll probably go up to at least 4K or 6K resolution which would require about 20 storage of what Google glass uses. Also, I’d expect demand higher quality audio as well.

    Of course, assuming exponentially cheaper storage, this would only add another 5 years or so to the estimated arrival of ‘infinite’ storage.

  7. Rivest says:

    No Mihai, I think Daniel is right on. We have better sound quality than the ear can get since a long time. Moreover, although I remember how hardrive and bandwith were a continuous problem for pictures, scans, music and movies (even simple software at the beginning). The amount I am spending in storage is getting ridiculessly low, enough so that I don’t by that much storage anymore (especially compare to milk 🙂 ).

  8. Vivek Haldar says:

    Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/) aims to do exactly this–digitize the sensory arena of an entire human life.

    From reading some of the papers, the impression I got was that the research challenge shifted very quickly from “how are we going to store all this data” to the retrieval problems in accessing, finding and presenting all that data in a coherently and quickly.

  9. Ionatan says:

    Recording everything you see might not be a good idea…
    Watch this episode of black mirror:
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/
    Well, watch all of then if you haven’t.

  10. Dave says:

    Video games file size are getting larger. Having 1tb or 2tb of hard drives useless.

  11. If you look at the cloud storage it is closest to the infinite storage as we know. Storage capacity is always something the people demand on getting more. From megabyte chips to terabyte disk drives and now to cloud storage.