Ask HN: Are we ever going to run out of space? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are we ever going to run out of space?

8 pointsjoshmlewis9 comments

Obviously we have data centers that are ridiculously huge and can store crazy amounts of information. It's kind of like all those major things that may not happen tomorrow but will probably happen soon.

On to my questions, if millions of people everyday are pouring information into the web, how does the web get rid of information? And at what point will we have a space problem because data has to be stored somewhere. It might be a dumb question because obviously we are good for now, but with more content intensive startups and companies form what does the future look like? Just curious what you guys think.

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There is a theoretical maximum information density in the universe, so eventually, we'll run out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Limit_on_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound

We potentially can run out of space, the same way we run out of Oil etc.

But we can go into deeps. The ground is an awesome solution for storing data and building data centers. Its great for cooling, but bad when the earth does bad stuff.

This is true and I suppose with more virtual space, less physical space we will be able to store more on less but even then it will be interesting to see. Do you know of any statistics of common data usage of people?

I don't think we will run out, because if it starts to become scarce, the price will raise and so people will stop recording everything, or at least they'll be forced to delete old stuff.

I think eventually we'll have to learn how to do proper data categorization, adding different levels of priority and assigning expiration dates according to them.

I have some hope that distributed data technologies based on non-trusted nodes (Bittorrent and similar being precursors of such) will play a big part on future data storage, though.

Hm, interesting thought. I'm sure there's a startup in there somewhere. Categorizing and managing data. Because really I don't need that paper I typed up 2 years ago on how plants grow, but I would like to keep that report I did on xyz. Having a system to assign certain dates to something...

Interesting thought.

It's not original ;) Content strategy/curation is the new buzzword, but I've listened to some talks by people involved in those kinds of projects, and they have interesting thoughts about it.

O'Reilly's page about Data[1] is a nice aggregation of articles and talks about such problems.

[1]: http://radar.oreilly.com/data/

As long as disks can be manufactured, and data centers can be built, we're not going to run out of storage space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder

Until our disks leave no space for food , may be.

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