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Comment by nmcela | Hacker News Reader

I am 100.0% sure this is what someone has said for 256GB drives, 256MB drives, 256KB drives, and the same person will be saying it for 256YB drives.

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I clearly remember getting an 80gb drive, circa 2001-2002 I think, and talking with my friends about how impossible it would be to ever fill.

The problem is that the size of media has been growing exponentially.

When I keep wondering how my phone is running out of space every time its images / videos. Even when you look at an app that is like 400 MB its not 400 MB of code, its like 350 MB of images and 50 MB of code.

I laughed today when it was announced Buldar's Gate 3 is 120GB

Even with all these advancements, 120GB for a game is still and always will be a lot!

Having many very high resolution textures adds up. I’m sure we’ll see it rise, especially in the age of generated textures and materials.

>I’m sure we’ll see it rise, especially in the age of generated textures and materials.

if generative AIs get good enough then I suppose at some point the data transmitted for games and media could be significantly less than now -- you'd 'just' need to transmit the data required for the prompt to generate something within some bounded tolerance.

Imagine a game shipping no textures, generating what was needed on the fly and in real time to fulfill some shipped set of priorities/prompts/flavors.

we're not there yet but it seems like on-the-fly squashing of concepts into 'AI language' is going to be a trend in lossy compression at some point.

There are actually a lot of procedural games out there, I think No Man's Sky uses some of those techniques, but they definitely have been around since the 80s. The thing now is that the fidelity can be much higher, for sure.

Interestingly enough I've been messing around with ffmpeg recently and the newest high end codecs (VVC / h266) drop HD video size by 30% or more, it's pretty crazy.

It'll be very interesting where AVIF and similar next generation image formats go in the near future, hopefully we'll get some reduction from the exponential growth.

I’d argue media storage usage is starting to level off somewhat because we’re approaching the limits of human perception. For movie content people with average to good eyesight can’t tell the difference between 4K and 8K.

Environmental regulations also bite, an 8K tv that’s “green” is going to have to use very aggressive auto dimming. Storage capacity growth to me looks like it’s outstripping media size growth pretty handily.

Now this isn’t to say I can’t think of a few ways to use a few yottabytes of data but I don’t think there is a real need for this for media consumption. You might see media sizes increase anyways because why not store your movies as 16K RAW files if you have the storage, but such things will become increasingly frivolous.

I would agree with you; but as technology improves we move the goalposts.

iPhones for example capture a small collection of images at the same time which are able to be replayed as a small animation (or loop) called “Live photos”.

I am certain the future will hold for us: video which allows us to pan left and right.

These both require more space.

Even 50MB of code is insane.

If it helps, I bought circa 1993 an Apple Powerbook (for at the time an awful amount of money) running System 7, that came with 40, 80 or 120 MB disk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerbook_160

I chose the 80 MB version as the 40 was too little, and the 120 was way too much for non-professional use (impossible to ever fill).

I remember being a kid at Babbages at the mall in the 90s and some guy told my friend and I that he just built a system with 8 gigs of storage, and my friend I talked about it endlessly as the coolest thing ever.

While I agree, it's been hard filling up the 2TB drive in my laptop.

My home server has a couple dozen terabytes (on spinning metal) and, with current fill rate, it's predicted it'll need an increase in space only after two of the drives reach retirement according to SMART. It hosts multiple development VMs and stores backups for all computers in the house.

Another aspect is that the total write lifetime is a multiple of the drive capacity. You can treat a 256TB drive as a very durable 16TB drive, able to last 16 times more writes than the 16TB one.

>While I agree, it's been hard filling up the 2TB drive in my laptop.

Then you're defiantly not torrenting enough "definitely legit" content as I am. Once you sail the dark seas it piles up quick. Or maybe I have ADHD.

Or just download a few modern games.

No torrents here, absolutely none.

I think, for me, it satisfies some kind of hoarding instinct. I have a hard time keeping 'random junk' laying around my apartment, but I have absolutely no problem keeping a copy of a DVD I ripped 15 years ago that I will probably never watch again, and would probably be upset if it disappeared for some reason.

Don't even have to set your sail; this landlubber likes likes to shoot videos with a smartphone, and these days, recording a few minutes of a family event, or even your plane taking off, in decent quality, will easily give you a multi-gigabyte video file. And that's for normal videos; $deity help you if you enable HDR.

And yes, this is the universal answer to "how much storage is enough" - use cases will grow to consume generally-available computing resources. Today it's 4k UHD + HDR; tomorrow it'll be 8k UHD + HDR, few years later it will be 120 FPS lightfield recording with separate high-resolution radar depth map channel. And as long as progress in display tech keeps pace, the benefits will be apparent, and adoption will be swift.

I'll be curious to see the file sizes for Apple's version of 3D video capture in their Vision goggles. After one, two or three generations, I'm sure the first gen files will look small and lacking.

Of course. It won't encode touch and smell.

I've actually found my videos are not increasing as rapidly as I would expect. I've been reencoding in x265 and the file size difference is shocking. Right now I'm not ditching the existing original files but I may do that at some point, or just offload to a cloud service like Glacier

I’m right up next to a limit on live (easily-accessible, always visible in photo apps) cloud storage, with years of family photos and video taking about 95% of that.

I definitely don’t want to delete any of it, so I have been just hoping for bigger storage to be offered soon, but…

I hadn’t considered that re-encoding could be an option. I take standalone snapshots of everything every few months so if re-encoding would make a significant difference I might have to try this.

Do you have any tips on tools, parameters etc. that work well for you, please?

I use a shell script with ffmpeg. I encourage you to check out what works best for you but honestly the quality is pretty stellar with just a really simple one like

    mkdir -p reencoded

    ffmpeg -i input_filename.mp4 -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast -c:a aac -b:a 128k reencoded/output_filename.mp4

That's a fast single-pass constant quality encode - a two-pass encode would be better quality for the size but I find that very acceptable. It knocks down what would be a ~2gb file all the way to between 800mb - 1200mb with very reasonable quality, sometimes even more - I've seen a 5gb file become a 400mb file (!!). You can experiment with the -crf 26 parameter to get the quality/size tradeoff you like. I run that over every video in the directory as a cron job basically.

Once you start saving media or playing with ai models space goes quickly.

That's what the server is for.

And there are many reasons for one to prefer having their workstation be their server.

In fairness, it has a screen and keyboard connected, but no mouse. Adding a mouse would be trivial.

Anyway, 20TB takes a 3.5" bay, something my laptop lacks.

Oh look at Mr. “I pay legitimate streaming services for all my tv shows and movies” over there. (=

I have a 12 TB NAS that is 99% full at the moment. Should I delete movies I may want to watch later, knowing full well they aren’t easily available on the streaming services I pay for? Ha.

It fills fast!

The people streaming their data are just using someone else's SSD... at the end of the day all this data we generate and consume sits somewhere

I'm also deduplicating that data by not storing it locally.

Sounds like you need a bigger NAS. I throw a fresh 10TB drive in mine every 3-4 months.

Start. Smart to cycle drives out after 3 years too.

I'm thrifty, I buy drives that businesses already cycled out after 3-5 years.

You laugh in the face of danger; a real risk taker! (=

I love all the Backblaze drive update posts about the lifespans of storage media.

Usenet is my backup. I've tried to make Backblaze my backup a couple times but the ETA on completing the first pass is always right about never.

It's interesting to think that, as flash densities surpass hard disks, it'll become cheaper to store data on flash than on spinning metal once you factor in rack space and power consumption.

Won't take that long.

For the kind of usage a streaming device has, an SSD is overkill. For that, spinning metal is probably a better choice. OTOH, 256TB of spinning metal take up space and is quite noisy.

They have 16TB NAS drives for $300 now so if you have decent disposable income just upgrading the drives one by one is probably a decent strategy.

Blu-rays can take up 25gb each, so just a decent collection of those could easily consume most of one of these drives. If you want to do basic model tuning in stable diffusion, each model variation can take 7gb. This level of storage would mean you could almost setup a versioning system for those. And finally, any work with uncompressed data, which can just be easier in general, could benefit from it.

256TB is 10,000 25GB BD movies.

Even with brand new 25TB 3.5" drives, it's 10 of them, each holding 1,000 movies, for a total of 20,000 hours of entertainment or, roughly, 2 years of uninterrupted watching.

That's a lot.

>256YB drives

Ah yes, Yagnibytes.

Y'otta look that one up.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody"

Was this the same person who said that 640KB ought to be enough for anybody?

They are probably still right. How much of the computing resources we all now have access to do we actually need?

Many novels are more than 640KB of ASCII text.

They are, but ought they?

Makes you wonder how people read long novels before they had enough RAM!

I vividly remember seeing a 5TB drive at Fry's Electronics sometime around 2010-2013 and thinking to my self "Who in gods name would ever need that much space"

I now have 24 terabytes in my NAS

But practically don’t you reach a threshold where storing that much data on one drive makes it a bottleneck and safety risk until the speed of the surrounding systems catch up?

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