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How can you say that we won't be needing more storage. 30 years ago who would've thought of storing hours of video on a disc that you can buy in a corner store. Needs change, maybe in the future a new format will come around that needs 1000 times more storage per minute. As you said need causes innovation, and it can work the other way too. If you have a medium and means (wired or wireless) than can hold or transfer vast amounts of data you can create something that utilizes that technology to its fullest and thus gain competitive advantage over your competitors. In other words, what you've written

Quote:Capacity needs have grown exponentially because what we're storing has grown.

may become, "what we're storing will grow exponentially because capacities will grow."

You eventually get to a point of "good enough", and portable hard drives, especially the kind that play music, are a hell of a lot easier to use, and a hell of a lot faster than read-only media. There will be less demand for the media because people only want the information, and the ease of use of carrying 80GB on a portable hard drive, whose information you can change, with the added benefit of playing music, is never going to be surpassed by "ease of use" of carrying media around.

If you look at the situation right now, I guarantee that I can copy data to my iPod and take it somewhere faster and easier than someone can burn read-only media, pack it up, and take it somewhere else for use, and that's not going to change.

Hard drives will be seen as "good enough" for people who want to store a lot of information, because their capacities are relatively high, and because they're easier to manage than removeable media.

There are millions of millions of iPods and other portable hard drives out there, and I would bet that the people who have them are using removeable media a hell of a lot less than they were before they had them.

The internet, with fiber-optic media, is going to come to a point where you'll be able to stream whatever you want on-demand, because it offers more bandwidth than we currently know how to use.

CD-type media is a hassle to use, because it's easy to damage and a pain to keep track of. It's not going to stick around.

When the price on portable hard discs like iPods falls enough, I just don't see any reason they would.

matt wrote: When the price on portable hard discs like iPods falls enough, I just don't see any reason they would.

But how much will it fall, if what you say becomes true and hard drives can hold vast amounts of information while the needs for storage don't increase as much, the sales of hard drives would plummet. Buy a "small" capacity hard drive and store everything you could ever need on it. With low sales there'll be no motive for invention and mass production and prices would remain forbiddingly high.

The way I see it the current trent will continue in the long term. Both capacities and needs will increase. There will be a place for both huge capacity hard drives and smaller capacity dirt cheap read only media.

matt wrote:[ I ] thought 5.25" floppies were the top of the line and didn't know that hard drives existed until about eight years ago

matt wrote:On the other hand, everyone with a computer from the last seven or eight years has USB ports

You knew about USB ports in 1997 but not hard drives?