The future of storage

Soon, a friend and co-technologist will post about the world of digital storage. He'll detail recent advancements, as well as where we are headed in the next five to ten years.

In the meantime, I would like to discuss an recent article written by Mike Shatzkin from Idea Logical co. In the article, he describes what he thinks will happen to publishing and books in 20 years

Overall, I agree with Mr. Shatzkin.  He points out that traditional publishers will be forced to adapt to a future populace that will be online. Users will have higher-speed access to everything digital. They'll use flat, folding displays, some without keyboards, some wearable, etc. A science fiction wonderland. All news, fiction, and non-fiction publishing will be on-line and in digital format.

But there is one thing I disagree with him on. He says, "I’d expect that 20 years from now, the “local” hard drive will be relatively unimportant: a relatively short-term “emergency” cache for the rare moments when you aren’t easily connected to the network (the internet.) Data — all data, including everything you think you “own” — will live in “the cloud.”

After pondering on this, then discussing it with other technology geeks like myself, I disagree heartily.

First, I should mention what I agree with him on:

Mr. Shatzkin refers to future "clouds" or networks. These are the common data centers of today, and, in the future, will continue to be rows and rows of solid-state or molecular-state storage cold-rooms. All forms of entertainment:  movies, You-Tube style video, eBooks, and down-loadable software will be out there. Just like it is today. Capacity will increase, but overall data-centers will remain similar. Also, we will continue to see a "leasing" of storage space like you can now with Yahoo!, Google, etc.

But, Mr. Shatzkin's theorizes that the local hard drive will become relatively unimportant. My qualms with that are twofold: privacy and throughput.

Here are the reasons for my disagreement:

1. Distrust and Privacy:
The human race is distrusting by nature... and justifiably so. I'm not confident people will trust of their personal data to be stored elsewhere.  When we hear that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and staff  do not believe in privacy, it's easy to see why.

Depending on their business sector, some companies will never go to an all-networking storage. Sure, employees of today and tomorrow store and back-up mass amounts of data via the network. Working copies, however, usually exist on local drives. The more cutting-edge, sensitive, or confidential the work...the more there's a need to keep it local.  

Think of it this way:  Imagine writing an entire novel and "saving" it online using Google's online word processing software. Considering their track record on privacy... would you put it out there? Would you honestly trust it to remain private and safe, and be there when you want it? 

2. Networking bandwidth.
Bandwidth rates to households is growing. But that rate is not doubling every 1.5 years like CPU processing power. Computers and gaming systems continue to crunch data far faster than they can receive it via a (sometimes unreliable) network. Unless this trend reverses itself, local computing will continue to outperform networking throughput. This requires a local storage.

3. Computer games.
In 20 years, games will be 3D in nature or holographic. Like today, gamers will play on-line. The size of the games will continue to drastically increase, not decrease.  Even online games like World of Warcraft are downloaded to local hard drives. The popular Final Fantasy XIII is over 35GB in size on the PS3. This game wouldn't have fit on the average hard drive ten years ago.

4. Video
Advancements in high-definition video continue to stun even a technology geek such as myself. The file sizes continue to grow, stressing the abilities of networking throughput. This means local storage is required. Sure, you can download a standard DVD, but ever try downloading a Blu-Ray?  The movies are now at least 20GB. That's 160Gb of data. Even if you're getting a consistent 5Mb download, which most don't today, that's still about 10 hours.

This blog isn't meant to criticize Mr. Shatzkin, as I found his article fascinating and agree with much of what he wrote. But until networking technology surpass the rate at which graphics and local processing power is being developed, I don't foresee the local hard drive going away in twenty years. The local storage drives will just just look very, very different.

I could be wrong... in 20 years we shall see.
~John Kurt