Is local storage on its way out?

Xelene

Xelene

Xelene

Soldato
Joined
27 Sep 2005
Posts
4,673
Location
London innit
So, I had an interesting experience today that put some of my recent challenges into light.

I currently have around 8TB local storage (which is way on the high side of normal), mostly used and mostly spending its time being unused. I'm hitting a real scaling problem with it, it's all held in one place, rarely accessed and basically hanging off USB ports. I was looking into scaling this, and it was going to be a grand or so to put something in place that would double that storage and put some redundancy in. That was going to cost a grand or two.

Today, I took my laptop into work to use their Internet to reinstall Diablo 3, it would take half a day at home. The game was installed in 4 minutes.

The Internet we've got is already matching optical drives. In a year or three, it's going to out perform spinning sheets of rust (it just about did for me today).

Are we going to have a TB or so of local cache and just stream the rest from the cloud?
 
Ch3m1c4L said:
50gb still takes a while to download on an 80mb fibre connection, so until we are all on 1gbps I dont see it happening for games. Also, who wants to have to download for a few minutes before playing a game? SSD's and RAID 0 SSD's are used for faster and faster load times, to eliminate seconds from a load time.

Media on the other hand, is perfectly feasible to just stream from an online storage facility, until your net breaks, and you then cant do anything on your PC.
Click to expand...

I'm not entirely sure what the Internet connect at the office is, but I suspect I was bottlenecked on the USB3 gigabit ethernet adaptor. However I was getting 45MB a second (Mega Byte not Mega bit!).

In personal use, I've already moved my music online entirely, once the Internets get faster for home use I can see my video collection going the same way - I have fairly crappy Internet (at home) and I can get decent quality 1080p video at around 1 minute of video in 1 minute of download. That work connection would do 1 minute of video in 2 seconds.

If other media is anything to go by, games will be streamed also. The binaries generally are tiny, they just have big asset blobs.

We may need to wait a few years for this :)

And we'll cache stuff we need and access frequently locally.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom