Wednesday, March 01, 2006

8 terabyte desktop? For whom?

I just read this piece of news: 8 Terabytes Desktop

It is like you can never have too much of the goodies! With such a large disk space on my desktop, I can have 'anything' I want stored on that. One of the first obvious advantages is that I can store videos, movies, arhcive literally everything and will 'never need to delete but just sort' - a la gmail.

But, think about it. This might be great for a student or a graphic designer who would need to store loads of data who works from one single place. But what about the regular IT pro? An IT pro's profile is like this. He/She travels from home to office and back everyday and sometimes to different offices within the country or outside his/her home countey. And sometimes to other destinations on travel. So, how would he/she efficiently use the TBs of info which is situated on his desktop at one office? Will this massive data storage be augmented by massive network bandwidths, by massive backup and recovery strategies?

To me, an ideal environment would be like this. I would stash away the laptop and any dependency with the hard disk out there. I would log on to the internet - from home, office, airport, from my car (car can have a light weight network computer), from my hotel and probably from general travel lounges across the world without being bothered about disk space, backup, RAID and security.

To me, internet bandwidth and availability are much more useful than terabytes of storage on a PC.

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