Some days ago, I came back to my hometown and I took some time to make some changes in my HP6710b laptop. I decided to change the 500GB Hard Disk Drive with a modern Solid State Drive. SSD prices are still high compared with and standard HDDs and as my laptop it's already pretty old I didn't wanted to invest too much on it, so I chose to buy a
OCZ Agility 3 SATA3 2.5" 120GB SSD for about 100€ (for this price you can have a 1TB regular HDD). Therefore, the storage capacity of my laptop has been reduced from 500 to 120 GB so I externalized all my data and projects and sterted using the new SSD drive for just the OS and all the programs. As I'm always dealing with big amounts of data I'm used to carrying around many external USB HDDs so it's not going to be a big change for me anyway. In the case I buy a new laptop soon, everything important will already be in external drives, making the migration less painful. I must say the leap to solid state drives it's worth the money. Everything goes smoother, both Windows and demanding programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere boot much faster than before.
While doing this process, I started to think on how much data I'm actually dealing with. I'm used to work with small portable HDDs that are more expensive but need no external power. I already have them labeled from 1 to 9, four of which are 1TB, and I'm already running out of space. I also thought on back ups. I should be doing a backup of all my content just in case a Hard Drive crashes, or gets lost or stolen. To do so, I will need at least another 4 HDD of 1TB, which adds 400€ to my budget.
I hope we will all have less storage problems in the future. I just discovered a site where HDD prices and storege capacities are collected and I make this estimation: In the year 2000 a 15GB HDD's price was 150€ approx, that's the equivalent of almost two DVD9 (8,5GB DVDs) and the price per GB was 10€. In 2010 a 1TB (1000GB) HDD was 100€ that means that each GB of data cost 0.1€ and the storing space was equivalent to 125 DL DVDs or 20 Dual Layered Blu-rays. So if this progression continues I have calculated that by the year 2020 we will have 67TB Drives for about 70€ that means 0.0001€ per GB and the equivalent on 8.375 DL DVDs or 1340 Blu-Rays storing capacity. All this in a device that fits in the palm of your hand. That would happen in just 8 years. We will see...
