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Comment by cyberlab | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a use-case for a 120TB drive for casual personal computing? I know we are in the age where 4K video is the new normal now, so I can see the use-case for massive .MP4 binary blobs sitting in these drives. But what other use-cases besides hi-def video are there? Also: if it is backups I would love to know what you're backing up! I try to keep my critical files down to 10GB so I can mirror it multiple times in many locations, but 120TB is whole new levels of strange.

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I hear you, but my experience is that increases in capacity (be it storage, processing, network, etc.) bring new possibility, new technology, and new use cases.

Here are some off-the-cuff possibilities:

"Photos" that are interactive "spaces" composed of combinations of many high-resolution images and (LI/RAY)DAR point clouds.

"Videos" that are the same or far beyond 8k

Individuals using constant-capture systems to archive their day-to-day, providing the ability to "never forget." This could be supplemented with local capture and storage of extensive biometric data for personal-health analysis.

Amazing graphics / texture sets to locally provide standard libraries for very high resolution AR / VR experiences.

Local archives of reference and web content so that it can be browsed privately to ensure privacy.

A general push-back against cloud storage in favor of local privacy. This might be powered by some federated system that allows individuals to give up some local storage in exchange for storage on other's systems.

Games have started exploding in size now that basically everything is downloaded (meaning there's no hard upper limit). In a particularly comical example, the last two Call of Duty games won't both fit on the PS4's 500GB hard drive at the same time, by themselves. [1]

120TB may still be more than you need for now, but 1-2TB in a gaming PC is now "cozy".

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/25/22302057/call-of-duty-war...

The size of data which "must" be stored always increases to fill the storage space available.

At the moment, I'm content with 14T drives for personal use, which is about 4x bigger than what I was using just a few years ago.

But if I had 120T, I would just start hoarding every bit of data I could get my hands on. I'm not quite https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ level yet, but I could totally see myself heading in that direction.

And at $DAYJOB we need to store data in the order of magnitude of a petabyte. This also seemed huge just a few years ago, but now feels restrictive. 30x 120T drives to shove into a rack in the data centre would totally be considered if it were possible.

I remember in the 90s I heard someone ask how you could ever fill a 1GB hard drive ...

Photos keep getting larger (raw, higher resolution, capturing additional information such as depth etc), videos keep getting higher resolution at 4k+ with higher bitrates, you can currently easily fill up a 1TB+ drive with video game assets and so on.

If you do any 3D work (engineering or artistic), the assets for these projects can be huge. If you're doing ML work training sets are massive. If you do more conventional development/content creation, software and assets needed keep getting larger with a never ending list of things to pull down from github etc. If you're just working with data/databases, the amount your working with never seems to get smaller and if it's time-based there's always more history to deal with as the years tick by.

Even if one does everything in 'the cloud', all you're doing is shifting the location of the storage needed rather than the quantity. So it's pretty much the same old story of 'more' when it comes to how much storage is needed.

I have saved on hard drive, pretty much all linear media I have watched the last 15 years (recorded TV). It takes up ~25Terra. Most of it is in SD, some of it is in HD, pretty much nothing is in 4K. With a 1Gbit connection I'm not bandwidth bound, I'm storage bound. 120TB for a single drive is a lot, but I could see myself being in striking range of using that.

I don't see much need for the personal computing. I know with my work, we regularly produce >30TB of high def video that we then need to sneakernet to our on shore storage and give out to clients. Not having to split the data between drives would really help.

While it's not really "casual personal" computing, if you're dealing with video streams for archive, you can run into that much data pretty easily. A dozen HD security camera streams will eat up like 200 GB a day at high quality.

full image backups that rotate out of multiple machines and phones would be an ideal usecase

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