Thursday, January 25, 2007 Ng: When there isn’t enough By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
SOMETIMES, we will never know how much is enough; and this is never more true than in computing.
I believe that when Microsoft designed MS DOS in the early 80s, they designed it to have only 640K of memory. At that time, when even mainframe computers have 64K of memory, 640K sounded huge.
But now, it is normal to have 512 megabytes of memory, which is, essentially, almost a thousand times bigger that what looked like the maximum limit 20 years ago. Some of our units now have two or four gigabytes in memory, and sometimes we still wish we had more!
As technologists point out aptly, the gadgets I bring alongside with me everyday have now more memory, more storage, and more computing capacity than the first spaceship that landed people on the moon!
The same holds true for hard disk space. Two years ago, I got a notebook and a new email account with Google Mail. The notebook had 80 gigabytes, and I thought I would never consume it.
Google Mail first offered one gigabyte of mail space (this was a big improvement over the two or five megabytes offered by other email providers), and it used that slogan that —given that much storage capacity — you will never have to delete your emails again.
Now, they are even providing more (about 2.8 gigabytes, as of this writing), and yet, I have been deleting emails for the last six months, and my notebook had become full that I now have an external hard disk.
Storage fills up quickly if you do video and store music and pictures. For instance, you see all those nice digital cameras with seven or 10 megapixels. That is well and good, except when you begin saving them into your computer.
You have to realize that each picture you upload can easily use up about eight megabytes. So imagine what would happen if you take a lot of pictures, such as during the Asean summit or Sinulog.
Unlike film, one can take a lot of photos with a digital camera without having to spend for developing and printing. So if you’re the kind who would rather take 100 bad pictures than miss a significant event, you could easily make 500 shots with a digital camera. But 500 pictures can easily use up more than four gigabytes.
It is not only that photos eat up a lot of space, but transferring them from external to internal hard disk (which used to be a snap using Firewire or USB) now seems to take really long.
Technology has come to the rescue.
There are new developments to add another port, the external serial ATA (Esata), that will be introduced to PCs. Esata is the external version of the technology that connects hard disks. The main thing is that it allows you to connect the hard disk with as much the same speed as those with Firewire or USB.
The USB theoretically has a transfer data of a maximum of 480 megabits per second, while Firewire (also called IEEE 1394 in other PCs) transfers either 400 or 800 megabits per second. Esata, on the other hand, can do three gigabits per second.
Esata drives are expected to become more popular this year, and could well become the standard (with most PCs having the port) in a few years. Of course, this also parallels the development of new DVD formats.
While current DVD now (with DVD-9) can have a maximum of 8.5 gigabytes per disc, there are now two formats that are competing to be the next standard. The HD-DVD can hold up to 30 gigabytes per disc, while Blu-Ray can hold up to 50 gigabytes per disc.
Seagate also recently announced something that is equally exciting. This is a 2.5-inch drive (brand name Savvio) which can spin data at 15,000 rounds per minute. This means there are now smaller devices that can replace 3.5 inch drives and are just as fast.
Smaller 2.5-inch drives used to spin only 10,000 rpm and, therefore, were slower than their 3.5-inch cousins. These 2.5-inch drives are normally found in blade or rackmount servers that save space or in computer notebooks.
With the introduction of smaller and faster drives –with their ability to generate less heat and use up to 30 percent less power– it is expected that blade and rackmount servers will continue to gain popularity, and will accelerate the trend of notebook computers replacing desktops.
Even as the computing power becomes faster (almost all new generation processors are now dual core — meaning they have two processors), big companies like Microsoft or Google continue to build data centers containing tens of thousands of servers as it tries to push the limit for even more power.
Thus, blade servers (which allow a company to easily cram over hundreds of processors in a few square meters of space) are becoming popular. And the ability to garner more computing power and storage with less space, less heat and less power requirements would continue to be the holy grail of computing.
Do you want a 300-gigabyte or 500-gigabyte hard disk on your computer? It sounds awesome now but maybe, three years from now, it will not be enough. Again.
