News Seagate hints at 8TB, 10TB hard drive launch plans

I completely see what you mean, but to some degree, I don't fully agree. Yes, as computer technology and digital media becomes more prolific and advanced, the demand for storage (and other things like processing power and RAM) increases as well. But the one thing you seemed to let slip by you is how you yourself said "a gigabyte of storage was more than I would ever need" which at the time was most likely very true. Way back then, there wasn't really anything much bigger than your OS that you would actually WANT to store on your computer, and rightfully so. It didn't make sense to store stuff like media and high density textures on a disk - it was more efficient in every sense of the word (except time) to use external mediums to store such things.

The interesting thing is how CPUs, RAM, the internet, and HDD technologies all improved at roughly the same time. When dialup was a home commodity, PCs at the time were still pretty slow and plenty of storage, but still not enough to store an abundance of high quality media. Because of this, compressed file formats like MPEG were released, allowing people to view media that their computers (and network connection) were otherwise unable to realistically work with, at the cost of CPU and RAM.

Anyway tl;dr, the point of me saying all of this is for a while, software itself had to get better in order to work around the limitations of hardware. Since HDD storage is so prolific these days, and because software like Windows or Titanfall don't even attempt to be sensitive to disk space, there is no amount of GB or TB that should be "all I'll ever need". To me, I see this as a problem, because it encourages laziness of both the user and developers. Just because you CAN easily have 6TB in a micro ATX system, it doesn't mean all of that space SHOULD be filled.

Personally, I find it good practice to intentionally put a limit on the disk space you are willing to use. Computers are quickly becoming like obese people - they have so much of things they need to survive that they become unhealthy.

 

That's a loaded question. No one "needs" greater storage any more than they "need" a PC in the first place.

I've filled a little over 2TB now, most of which I keep a backup of. What do I "need" that space for? None of anyone's business.

 

lol well when you put it that way, now we all know what it is.

 

Ha, in a friendlier context I'll gladly share it's mostly TV shows and movies, with in-game video recordings accounting for a growing amount.

It could all be porn, though, and that'd be an equally valid reason to have so much storage. Whatever the home user does with their privately owned and purchased hard drives is their own choice.

 

Mine is mostly filled with raw video I've shot and will probably never use. That's about half of it. Another quarter is porn and the rest is photos, music, and whatnot. If you do any sort of AV content creation it's not hard to fill up space in a hurry.