It’s Happening Now: This is the Tera Era of Data Storage

It’s not terribly revelatory to say that there has been an explosion in the amount of digital data recently. After all, in the decades since the term “Information Age” was first coined back in 1971, uninterrupted, unrelenting data growth has been perennial.

In the 1980s, the new Mac OS and Windows layout-rich documents and spreadsheets replaced simple ASCII-based files, invoking the transition from the temporary storage of the day, the 360 kilobyte (KB) 5¼-inch floppy, to much higher capacity 1.44 megabyte (MB) 3½-inch floppies.

In that same decade, IBM introduced the 3380, the world’s first gigabyte (GB) capacity hard drive, and it was time for our language to march forward as well. Soon, gigabyte supplanted megabyte as the common term for storage capacity.

And the march continues. New visual and audio file types and increased computing power continue to drive storage capacities upward. But today’s digital data explosion is, indeed, very different.

This is a new era of increasing storage capacity. The Information Age has given way to the Internet Age. Digital data now permeates much more of our lives and lifestyles. It spans our laptops and desktops, of course, but also a new host of broadly used consumer devices like digital cameras, mobile phones, digital video camcorders, car navigation systems, gaming devices, digital video record­ers (DVRs) and handheld audio players, each wholesaling in comparatively huge file types. And while some of these devices have internal solid state storage, many more also have hard drives. Moreover, virtually all of these devices ultimately interact with a larger hard drive storage system for the ability to access, network and share files, songs and games, video footage, digital movies or photos.

More eye-opening still, the large files we have now are clearly just the beginning. A peek into the near-term future reveals even larger file types from uncompressed digital audio, digital television (DTV), downloadable high definition movies and even interactive 3D video, are all on the way.

So while unrelenting data growth may not be a revelation, something bigger is happening. At the center of this powerful story is an inter­section of three points. It’s a crossroad where Culture, Capacity and Content are colliding to create a whole new world view of data. And, once again, it has become time for our language to change.

It’s now time to say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the terabyte.

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Source: Computer Technology Review
By: Larry Swezey