The world+dog wants petabyte storage systems

Last week I wrote: "How many 500 GB or 750 GB disks do you think you'll be buying for personal use in the next twenty four months? … If any of you have said more than "two," please e-mail me now because I really can't understand how you expect to watch all that porn in your lifetime without every leaving the house again."

I don't own an HDTV, yet there are enough of you addicted to the experience/technology already to point out that recording HD programming, porn or not, is a serious disk hog. One bloke wrote to tell me he has added 1.5 TB to his storage array in the past twelve months and expects to add another 2.5 to 3 TB over the next year, with another 4 TB added on in the following year. Those planning ahead for BluRay porn point out that at 50 GB a pop, er disk, you can fit around ten (10) feature length videos onto a 500 GB disk.

Others don't even need HDTV to fill up disk space. One reader said he had about 3 TB of TV shows backed up from his TV and JVC DVR devices and was looking at building a big RAID 5 array from 30 (!) 500 GB disks. Then there are the folks who delve into writing video codecs or digital photography, so keeping around a lot of uncompressed still photos or video is a necessity.

Then there's the gaming crowd. Some record their multi-player adventures onto "video" for future posterity and laugh tracks. Others do mods for games and have no problem sucking up 300 to 400 GB at a pop with the library of different things they've done or are building.

Perhaps the HD-addicts, er, early adoptors have a point here. As a relative benchmark, the TiVo mod guys at weaKnees sell the stock TiVo Series 3 - the HDTV recording version - capable of recording 32 hours of HD onto a 250 GB SATA drive. Moving up to a 750 GB SATA drives enables recording of up to 100 hours of HD video, at a cost of $1200.

From an economics standpoint, if you are willing to shell out upwards of $1500 or more for either a large screen LCD or plasma TV capable of handling 1080i, shelling out another $1200 today for an upgunned TiVo 3 probably won't make you blink. Same with buying a couple more drives and an enclosure.

There's a big market opportunity for the first successful PC manufacturer that decides to build an affordable home server for the video addicts today and the "rest of us" tomorrow. It'd have at least one GigE interface on it, maybe 200 Mbps Powerline AV built in, a wireless USB "port" and a couple of old-fashioned USB 2.0 ports and Firewire, and support for multiple SATA drives, say at least four. Plus come with a software load that enabled both media/video sharing within the home and automatic backups for the PCs around the house. Today's price without disks would be around $500, tomorrow's price obviously how. µ