Coming up for air
Parkinson’s Law states that:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
I was about to propose a corollary to this and apply it to data storage, but if you check the Wikipedia link above, you’ll find they’ve already got it covered:
Data expands to fill the space available for storage.
Our fileserver had a 120G drive in it up until about a year ago. It ran out, and I replaced it with a new RAID5 setup, and today we have:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md1 1.4T 1.3T 73G 95% /data
That’s 1.3 Terrabytes out of 1.4 used, for my non computer geek readers (which is.. what, no-one?). An interesting comparison is my very first computer hard drive which I bought around 1992 or so, which was 50MB. The above partition is (approximately) 1402519MB, or a frankly ridiculous 28,050 times larger than my first drive, and it’s still running out of space.
My next upgrade will probably be 4*2T drives, which in a RAID5 arrangement will give me about 6T of usable space, hopefully. Of course, I’m going to have to Ebay a kidney to pay for it, so in the meantime, I may have to find some stuff to delete.
Anyway, my point seems to be that we’re basically coming up with new ways to fill data that is keeping pace with the growth in hard drive technology. 17 years ago (wow, is that when 1992 was?), 50MB was plenty of space for operating system, applications, data, etc.. These days, we’ve got video files, just one of which would easily fill 50MB for a few seconds of footage. Add in HD and you’re talking serious growth. Where does it stop? I fully expect that another 17 years from now we’ll be measuring our storage usage in Exabytes, as we download our daily brain backup. Gulp.