CTO Articles
Published in IT World
August 29, 2006
If 80 gigs is enough, then...
I have an 80 gigabyte hard disk in my laptop and, for the first time in my career in computing, I am having difficulty filling it up with stuff that I need to do my job. Sure I can fill it with lots of audio and lots of video (given enough bandwidth and patience) but to be honest, the amount of multimedia stuff I need for my day job is limited to some podcasts and the occasional product demo video.
Perhaps this will change over the next few years as the rise and rise of digital information volume continues unabated. Perhaps document and database sizes will continue to spiral upwards eating more and more disk space as they have done for the last, say, ten years. Perhaps the idea that 80GB is enough personal storage space for a business laptop will prove to be as wrong as the assertion that - ascribed to Bill Gate's - that 640k was enough memory for any personal computer to have.
Perhaps. However, it is an invigorating experience to leave a hostage to fortune from time to time so I will forge on. Here is what I am thinking. Suppose my 80GB hard disk proves to be a sensible size and form factor that latches itself into the market for a reasonably long haul - like the VHS tape or the CD-ROM from days of yore. Suppose further, that the market realizes this and builds some sort of standard adapter so that swapping an 80GB hard disk in and out of a laptop is a piece of cake. Could that change the world in any way?
Probably not, but there is at least a non-zero possibility that it might, in two ways. Firstly and most simply, wouldn't it be great if copying an 80GB hard disk bit-for-bit was something you could do with a stand-alone device selling for a few hundred dollars and perhaps conveniently located for pay-per-use in shopping malls and airports? This would address one of my big concerns which is that when on the road, I am generally remote from my main backup mechanisms. It would be great to be able to make wholesale backups on the road with the same convenience as making photocopies.
Secondly and less probably, wouldn't it be great if some high volume hard disk format - some filesystem - became equally usable on the three mainstream desktop/laptop environments of Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux? If that happened, it is at least possible to dream about hitting the road without a laptop on your arm at all. Simply plug your 80GB hard disk into the terminal at the coffee shop or the arm rest on the airline.
I am aware that this concept appears to fly in the face of the received wisdom that any day now, we will all keep the normative version of all our data online and just use our local storage as a scratchpad. Personally, I buy into that vision for some types of content but when it comes to important business data, I want that to be in my own possession thank you very much. Preferably in my shirt pocket and preferably with a backup copy, freshly minted in the hub airport while I waited for that connecting flight, sitting in my carry-on bag.