can the internet ever become full?

Mistermeaner

At the moment more and more stuff is being stored everywhere, some gets deleted but most not. At the moment we are getting more and more efficient at storage of data. We are also producing more and more storage so all is good at the moment. However....

In a world of limited resources and at the point where we are at optimum efficiency is it possible we will run out of space? When there is no more silicon to be mined, no more compression and we have deleted everything we don't need..... could this happen?

Is it possible to 'programme' hardware to have virtual storage with such virtual storage having a capacity greater than the hardware upon which it sits?

I read once about how some clever kid had built a 16bit computer in minecraft using 'logic' blocks. This virtual computer could then be independently programmed within minecraft. Bizarre

Discuss

It's friday

kabayiri

You don't need silicon to build storage.

Power and cooling requirements demanded by these large server farms; that does present an issue; but it's really an engineering challenge.

The question should be : what do we do with the management of stale data and information?

I once ran a tool on a client's shared servers. There was a latency figure of something like 97%. Put in basic terms, 97 out of 100 documents/files rarely changed, and it would be difficult to assess if they were still relevant/current without expensive examination.

How much of internet content is already out of date?

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

kabayiri wrote: »

I once ran a tool on a client's shared servers. There was a latency figure of something like 97%. Put in basic terms, 97 out of 100 documents/files rarely changed, and it would be difficult to assess if they were still relevant/current without expensive examination.

Our company has a 'never delete' email and customer-involved-document archive policy.

We estimate it saves us around £500K a year in potential liability with historical contract disputes.

That pays for a lot of storage.

kabayiri

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Our company has a 'never delete' email and customer-involved-document archive policy.

We estimate it saves us around £500K a year in potential liability with historical contract disputes.

That pays for a lot of storage.

I hadn't considered that.

I remember a client using out of date information to bill a chippy £50K for utility services. They paid it, and for their troubles they were billed £50K the following month!

(The real bill was closer to £2K max)

Thrugelmir

Security issues not space will be the issue. This weeks attack on JANET was an illustration of how fragile connectivity can be.

SailorSam

They were worried they were running out of space and had started to make plans for rationing. But then someone in silicon valley found a way to store things up in the sky. So for the timebeing, until the Clounds get full, we're safe.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

kabayiri wrote: »

I hadn't considered that.

It's amazing how often we need to call up communications or documents from 5-10 years ago to prove disputed issues.

At least once a month.

vivatifosi

A previous company that I worked for scrapped its old customer orders and invoices that were over about ten years old. They changed computer systems and it was deemed too expensive to keep a legacy one. This struck me as silly because the replacement cycle for what they sold was an average of seven years, and they could have mined the data for sales leads.

I did tell them they should perhaps consider a different path, they ignored me. However they then had the problem of customers wanting to buy parts for out of warranty items, but not fully knowing what the customer had ordered or whether they could sell. This was B2B, so orders were typically quite large.

To be fair to them, this was some years back, before the concepts of data mining, big data etc had caught on, and storage was relatively expensive.

Generali

vivatifosi wrote: »

To be fair to them, this was some years back, before the concepts of data mining, big data etc had caught on, and storage was relatively expensive.

I had a look at the costs of storage a while back.

In the early 60s, 1TB of memory would have cost the GDP of the entire world.

In the early 80s it would have cost the same as a typical row of London terraced houses.

Now it costs a couple of hours income, less than a nice meal out for a family or a really good bottle of wine.

wymondham

Generali wrote: »

I had a look at the costs of storage a while back.

In the early 60s, 1TB of memory would have cost the GDP of the entire world.

In the early 80s it would have cost the same as a typical row of London terraced houses.

Now it costs a couple of hours income, less than a nice meal out for a family or a really good bottle of wine.

or 'free' if you have onedrive......

Kendall80

I just bought a 3TB drive for £70. I'll probably need another by next year. Family movies and LOTR in HD take up a considerable amount of space.