• fishos@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    The issue is, every time we make a great leap in storage medium, we tend to use that new storage for BIGGER files. Higher quality media and all that. Back in the day, the average movie file was measured in the MB. Now it’s GB. Think about an old floppy with 1.4 MB of data and how many text files you stored on it. You couldn’t ever imagine needing more space. Then came pictures and music files. Video files. Then higher resolution picture and video files. Suddenly even your text documents aren’t just raw .txt files, but Word documents and interactive PDFs.

    As storage improves, what we expect to be able to carry around with us or have in our home computer changes. I’m currently running a home server with 18TB of storage. An amount that I would have never dreamed of possessing 20 years ago, and yet here I am debating when I grab that 24TB drive because I can already see me running out of space in a few months.

    This is all to say that I really don’t think there will ever be a maximum amount a user could need. Give them that maximum and in a week they’ll have figured out a way to use it to capacity. I think video games and cartridge/disk size limitations and then the transition to digital games and balloning game size shows my point.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      This demand is also dictated by what companies see as a default setup, now it’s 0,5Tb+ SSDs as syst drives. W10\11 doesn’t work on HDDs because their update and security services can overwhelm your disk’s speed and make the system unresponsive. If you are given an older hardware by your employer, good luck, as your OS and other programs assume they don’t need to limit either speed or size, and the only way to keep using the same features is to upgrade.

      • fishos@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Exactly. Eventually what we see now as cutting edge will become “bare minimum” or even “obsolete” hardware one day. Eventually the camera on your cell phone will by default be taking such high resolution pictures that anything less that a TB of onboard storage will seem quaint.

    • DJDarren@thelemmy.club
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      3 months ago

      Our family’s first proper PC back in around ‘93 had a 1gb HDD. I remember strutting about at school like I was the top shit because of how great my computer was.

      These days I have a modded iPod mini with 128gb that I’m getting close to needing to increase because of my love of 320kbps MP4 files.