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> Imagine if mass-storage devices were cheap enough that you could afford 307 gigabytes for a single movie. Your hardware would still have to support a sustained data rate of 1 Mbyte per second to play it back.

I recently bought a $20 flash drive to store the entire contents of a my friend's late-2000s PC with a 250GB hard drive on. Didn't think much of it.

(Yes, I know the article is from 1994.)

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If mass storage densities had kept on doubling every 13 months or so, 307 gigabytes per movie file would probably not seem extraordinary today – we would have several-PB storage media by now. But as it stands, even a state-of-the-art hard drive isn't going to hold many uncompressed movies – especially given that 640x480 doesn't quite cut it anymore!

Even with that modern stupid large flash drive, you'd only have a single movie two hour in 480p for the 300GB. Even just MPEG-1 video (in 480p) you could store over 150 two hour movies in the same space. A modern codec like h.264 could fit twice that many.

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