Can you imagine carrying all the books from a public library on your keychain?That became possible in 2006.
How about carrying the entire Library of Congress or British Library or any of the other great libraries of the world and that includes Le Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
That will be possible by 2020, with room to spare.
At prices we can afford, here is the timetable:
- 2000 = 32 Megabytes
- 2010 = 32 Gigabytes
- 2020 = 32 Terabytes
32 terabytes is larger than anyone’s estimation of how much a collection as large as The Library of Congress would take for every word to be stored in your personal computer.32 gigabyte thumbdrives made their appearance in 2006, enough memory in a flashdrive to carry tens of thousands of books on a keychain. While these are not year affordable to an average person today, they will be by 2010.
32 megabytes was the size of my own first USB memory stick in about the year 2000, now pretty much of only antique value to someone such as myself, but they still sell them at Target on the “impulse buy” racks next to the checkout lanes for $5.
32 terabytes is the obvious trend for the year 2010, giving a person the ability to carry the entire Library of Congress on a keychain at an affordable price.
Today the average person can buy a RAMstick for so little the price doesn’t even really matter for the smaller ones at cost levels of $5 and up right over the counter, and even less, if you are willing to buy four at a time via mail order, even to get RAMdrives up to 256 megabytes the prices can be so low as to not really be a factor.
By the way, at the time of the writing of this article, flash drives as large as 64 gigabytes were on the market for $5,000 and I couldn’t find a discount even on buying 100.
A Personal History, and a Few Added Details
I bought my first USB flash RAMstick well under 10 years ago, not so many of us could have afforded one a whole decade ago.This 32 megabyte RAMstick of mine still works fine, but is an antique in the sense that today you could buy one to hold one thousand times as much data. . .again, not to many people can afford 32 gigabyte memory sticks today, but by 2010 you could have one of your own without too much difficulty.
32 gigabytes is enough to carry every word in an average book collection in the average public library, over 30,000 books.
My first one of these was enough to carry a few dozen books.
Today’s 32 gig versions carry tens of thousands.
By 2020 they will carry tens of millions without any increase in their rate of growth from 2000 to 2010 to 2020.
By the way, at the time of the writing of this article, flash drives of 64 gigabytes were available for $5,000, at least in advertisements, though playing with the ordering forms, I was not sure they actually were delivering yet…when I put one order together for 100 units, as I set up for all of my start orders processes to check pricing, there was no discount made and they actually wanted ~half a million dollars.
We also need to consider faster RAM transfer speeds for large transfers to and from hard drives. In addition we should see about the possibilities of Firewire rather than USB, to avoid bogging down cpu and cache time with the transfers. Firewire doesn’t take much CPU time, but just try tranferring from one USB to another and you’ll see what I mean about this.
I actually did some testing of moving gigabytes over USB wire connections during this process, and feel I should mention it isn’t all that fast, you’d better have something else to do– we did it over a long lunch, and it still took longer than we actually wanted to spending eating at an all you can eat kind of smorgasbord. We spent hours, and if we had spend twice as much time, perhaps we could have sent 100G. We also tried an alternate session with Firewire instead of USB, but it didn’t go a lot faster, in fact it SAID it was going to be slower at the initial estimated speed, but things picked up over time– in the end it was hard to tell which was faster without using a real clocking process.