The Terabyte divide

The best thing about technology is that it strides real fast. It also is the worst part since you buy an electronic product and two years down the line someone out there is going to show you an upgraded version available at a much cheaper cost. It’s interesting because there are going to a lot of people who’d be hit pretty hard because of this, and some will have a lot to gain. Leading the pack of the losers would music, movie and software companies, due to the staggering piracy possibilities.

I'm in two minds regarding placing an order for a 160 GB hard disk. A couple of my friends have procured it and are satisfied with the speed/storage performance, but there are a couple of others who prefer to 'wait' for the 250 GB disk. In the mean time, here's Hitachi's announcement of the 1 TB DVD recorder. That's 1024 GigaBytes. Nuts, I say! But then, I have no doubts regarding the supply of content to fill up all the space. And here’s the big fight between Sony and Toshiba over the next generation DVD format. One painful thing about all this is that there could easily be a 2-5 year divide between developed countries and ours before the technology catches up.

That aside, I go bonkers everytime I think about the technology in future. Ten years from now, it’s safe to guess that the specs would be something like:

• 100 GBPS LAN transfer rate/2 GBPS internet connection.
• 50 TB hard disks10 TB DVD or some high density writers.
• And a compatible range of processors and multimedia equipment.
  

Imagine piracy with such specifications. Its common knowledge that you could go to Ritchie Street in Chennai or Palika Bazaar in Delhi anytime now and get a 5-movies DVD pack, or a 100 song MP3 CD or a single disk with some 5/10 games/software for something around 100 bucks, if you bargain well. But with Terabyte kind of technologies, you could get something like 100 movies and 2500 songs in single disks. That’s frightening. Who would be ready to buy an original CD or its equivalent containing a mere 5 songs? Guess that’s the interesting part thinking about future.