Fill in the blank: There’s not enough storage on my __________.

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Funny how flash aspires to be like hard drives when it comes to capacity, and hard drives aspire to be flash when it comes to performance.

No doubt capacity capabilities of flash is a focus for the industry. New technologies are driving innovation in providing consumers more and more capacity…sounds familiar.  Hard drives have been doing exactly that for years, and continue to move in that direction, albeit at a slower pace. Ironically, hard drive suppliers are also looking for ways to deliver more performance with the advent of hybrid drives which use just a little bit of flash in conjunction with spinning media to deliver performance that rivals flash based SSD solutions.

Hard drives want to be faster (and bigger), flash is already fast, but wants to get bigger. Just consider this post from GigaOM: “Want a terabyte iPad? Then you’ll want to read this” which talks about flash innovations that make it “possible to build terabyte or petabyte memory that can fit into a mobile phone or tablet without resorting to expensive and exotic alternatives. So today’s 64GB iPad may soon get higher-end cousins that can store even more memories and games on the tablet — if we don’t all run to the cloud with our content first.” 

The question being, does flash need need to be…bigger?

Thorin Klosowski wrote an interesting post on Lifehacker titled “You’re Probably Paying Too Much for Storage Space You Don’t Need” which discusses a recent report by iSuppli noting the cost difference between the 8GB and the 16GB model of Google’s Nexus 7 tablet. The post poses the question, is the cost of the additional 8GB of storage worth it?

Thorin confesses in the comments, “Confession time. I convinced myself to pick up a 32GB iPad because I was thinking I’d feel cramped in a year or two with the 16GB model. Truth is that it was a waste of money and I didn’t/don’t need it. How about you? Is a 8GB Nexus 7 or 16GB iPad enough for you?”

Adam Dachis responds, “I basically put nothing on tablets so it’s definitely a waste of money for me there. But on smartphones, I’ll take as much space as they’ll give me. I load mine up with so much music that I’m looking forward to upgrading to 64GB one of these days. So, for me, it definitely depends on the device.”

Adam raises a good point. One that resonates with me, and I tend to agree with.  I put way more content on my smartphone than I would on a tablet, so bigger would be better.  But, we all have different usage models and preferences when it comes to where we keep our music, photos, videos, etc. I still keep everything on my home PC (backed up of course), some stuff on my phone, some in the cloud. When it comes to my home PC, I planned to use a lot of the capacity available so I opted for a large hard drive. My phone…I went affordable, and opted for 16GB, and iCloud, I just upgraded to 15GB.

So if I were asked to fill in the blank: There’s not enough storage in my __________.  I gotta go with phone, so the potential for a 1TB smarthphone is music to my ears!

How would you fill in the blank?

Related Posts:

Growing hard drive capacity is infectious

“Hybrids are the Next Big Thing in storage devices”…music to my ears

 SSD vs. SSHD vs. HDD – Who Wins?