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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 476197" data-attributes="member: 2020">Serial ATA will greatly increase access time, from what I am hearing.  And now, a 250 gigabyte hard drive is available, in the magazines, for only $300 dollars U.S..  Why is a 1 terrabyte hard drive important?  Why do I want one?  Well ...  Consider the memory requirements of uncompressed high definition television.  1 gigabyte per minute, or even more, right?  So, the extended version of FOTR, which is 3 1/2 hours long, would take up 210 gigabytes of space on a hard drive, if it was delivered in uncompressed HDTV, and it took up 1 gigabyte per minute.  If a personal video recorder has a 40 gigabyte hard drive, you aren't going to want to buy it, because it cannot record much HDTV.  Now, perhaps with compression, it will record more HDTV, but still not very much - not as much as you would want, no?  You don't record HDTV on your PVR?  You record only at VCR quality levels?  Well ... soon HDTV will be the standard in television!  Perhaps you will want to record the 1080i program in 1080i, and not in 330 lines!  But what if you had a PVR with a 1 terrabyte drive?  Now, you could record 4 FOTR: EEs on it, assuming uncompressed HDTV.  40 hours of compressed HDTV.  And maybe 1,000 hours of your typical 330 line NTSC television.  A better bargain for the money, if the 1 terrabyte hard drive costs only $300, like the lesser hard drives before it once did!  And ...  If they can now produce a 1 terrabyte hard drive, they have undoubtedly made technological breakthroughs to get there.  These breakthroughs will allow them to continue to build bigger and better hard drives.  Hard drives will continue to double in capacity every year.  The year after the introduction of the 1 tb hard drive, they will have a 2 tb hard drive.  That's 8 FOTR:EE movies, in HDTV, and uncompressed.  The next year, a 4 tb hard drive.  16 FOTR:EE movies, in HDTV, uncompressed.  The next year, an 8 tb hard drive.  32 FOTR:EE movies, in HDTV, uncompressed.  The NEXT year, a 16 tb hard drive.  64 FOTR:EE movies, in HDTV, uncompressed.  There is something to be said for a world in which you can have an entire library - a very large library of hundreds of thousands of books - on the hard drive of your personal computer sitting on your desk.  There is even more to be said about a world where you can have the greater part of Human Knowledge stored in the hard drive of your personal computer.  And you will be able to access most of that knowledge, because there will be an ultra high speed internet for just that purpose.  This does not mean you will be able to pirate information you have not purchased.  This does not mean you will have access to restricted information.  It DOES mean, however, that you will have access to information you could not have hoped to have accessed, without repeated, exhaustive research trips to a major college, digging through the endless rows of books in dusty libraries, spending months searching through a grating array of library cards and information desks, making endless telephone calls and talking with endless secretaries.  How do I know this?  Well ... I know because that is precisely what I had to do, once, to acquire information that now I can find in seconds on the Internet!  Yes, having a PVR with the ability to record 32 or 64 FOTR:EE in HDTV, uncompressed, will be neat.  I'm sure a lot of people will buy said PVRs.  But it's the ability to access and store vasts amounts of knowledge, period, that is so important.  I USED the example of uncompressed HDTV BECAUSE it is so very memory intensive - books do not require nearly that much memory to store in a HDD.  If you can store all these uncompressed HDTV films in the hard disk drive of your PVR, what else can you store in hard disk drives?  A lot of good stuff, that's what.  People speak of Virtual Reality.  VR simulations, VR games, etc.    Well, it takes memory for VR.  And access speed.  And CPU speed.  And lots of other things, but above all it takes MEMORY.  If you want to explore the Earth, wearing your VR helmet, you are going to need the memory capacity in your system to do it.  When we start talking terrabyte hard drives, perhaps - just perhaps - we will be talking sufficient memory to do things like that!</blockquote>

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