Imagine the capacity you could stuff into a 5.25" drive bay form factor.....4-6TB's ? Of course it would only cost like 5 thousand bucks each, but for the right power user if the productivity is there it just pays for it's self.
Hi there
with a 5.25 inch you are looking not in TB but in PB (1000 * 1 TB) ranges -- Moore's law will make the price drop and capacity increase in smaller form factors but until these things happen, for single HOME user systems the cost isn't likely to be worth the performance gain in any case -- also do you need very fast I/O for simply playing even HD / Blu Ray quality video or doing email.
In fact not only Texting but even email as a communication medium is beginning to pass its sell by date. Using Social media (although I don't really like things like facebook etc) will become more and more of the norm --and even at work now if I need something I'll use our online chat system (Ms Lync) instead of wasting my time with loads and loads of pointless company e-mails - and I think this is a general trend - especially amongst the younger set bought up with smart phones and tablets. So that's one huge chunk of data we don't need anymore --email backups / archives etc.
Even Online shopping -- More people are now using "Instant Chat" as well as the e-commerce websites so again the amount of this type of data we need to store is actually diminishing.
I reckon now apart from Music and other multi-media stuff I store LESS data now than I used to - my peak was probably 2 or 3 years ago -- now I rarely keep emails for more than a week or so and most of my documents I need I convert to PDF or EPUB depending on the content and save on an E-Reader -- hardly SSD type of speed needed there.
Very fast SSD's will come into their own for huge data base searches (Interpol, FBI, CIA, Google even) and of course server farms where huge numbers of Virtual servers can supply thousands of customers with "Their own machine" images at decent speeds.
For continuous cloud backup perversely you don't need mega fast storage which seems to be contrary to what you probably would expect.
But THINK about it for a minute. Your continuous backup strategy would develop a decent algorithm on LRU (Last recently used) which would be backed up conventionally -- on the CLOUD where you would have two sorts of storage --faster staging storage where the LRU item was stored with it being backed up or migrated to slower longer term storage after its last used period had passed a certain threshold time period since being last used. So frequently used data (usually a very small subset of what you actually store on your computer including external HDD's etc) would be saved on faster SSD type devices while the rest on conventional HDD's.
As a user you wouldn't have to know or even care when the Cloud data was migrated between the two sets of devices -these tasks would be performed as scheduled jobs in the background without any interaction needed from the user.
For recovery the most recently used items would be on the faster "staging" storage -- while if you needed a file that hadn't been used for a long time --this would be on slower conventional (and cheaper) storage -- recovery would take a little longer but for the price factor I don't think it would trouble the users too much as over 80% of their data that they needed to recover or store -- which as I said before would only be a TINY fraction of the total data the user owns would probably stay on the faster staging devices.
Cheers
jimbo
