The '500,000-song' iPod isn't surprising

IBM researchers have reportedly demonstrated technology that will increase hard drive capacity 100-fold, as well as offer major improvements in energy consumption (leading to much longer battery life) and better reliability. Production is estimated in seven to ten years.

In seven years, we'll be measuring hard drive capacity for portable devices in terabytes.

(Credit: Apple)

The reports summarizing the researchers' findings, which were published in Science (subscription required), use the shorthand "500,000 songs on a portable MP3 player" to describe the advance.

Today's iPod lineup contains no product advertised to hold 5,000 songs, so I'm not sure where the 500,000 figure came from. In fact, the current highest-capacity iPod is 160GB, and is advertised as being able to hold 40,000 songs. So this shorthand would imply a hard drive size of just under 2TB--only 12.5 times bigger than today's largest iPod.

That's actually well short of what Kryder's Law predicts--if hard drive capacity continues to double every year, then the hard drives of 2015 should be 128 times larger than today's. So the IBM researchers' claims of up to 100x capacity, while impressive, are not particularly surprising given the trends of the past decade. According to my calculations, 100x would mean the biggest iPod would have a 16,000 GB hard drive, which would be enough to hold more than four million songs at the current advertised compression rates. Or if you assume that Apple's lossless codec compresses the typical song to about 25MB, it could hold about 650,000 songs--with no loss in audio quality.

Of course, few people would use a portable hard drive of that size solely to store music--movies, games, and applications will probably take up most of that space. Still the idea that we'll be carrying terabytes of data in our pocket in a few short years explains why Apple, Microsoft, Google, and the rest of the industry are focusing so much attention on mobile computing.

[srynningb]

I don't like to say "never", but I don't the we'll see a 2T iPod. By the time that's possible, wireless networks will be so fast and ubiquitous we won't need to carry much data on the device itself.

[gsmiller88]

I wonder how long it is until the iPod can hold more songs than are sold at the iTunes Store?

[dbargen]

This is good news to an increasing problem of storage space. For the last 7 years or so, Models like Apple's have been teaching people to put EVERYTHING on their computer's HD, be it music, photos, movies, or the other myriad of media that people enjoy. Despite the decent drop in drive size, it's meant that as you buy/record/aquire more, you'd need to update what you have.

Now there's even the consumerized (simplified) backup ability in Time Machine which basically has you keep every file you've ever touched on an external drive. Yes, I know you can set it to not back up certain items, but for people who are just starting, the learned tendecy will be to just add more/bigger external drives to back up to, which have to be connected (instead of archived) so you can always go back.

The convenience of having all of your media there is like crack- it hurts when it's not there anymore. The only thing that might have slowed this train was cost and space. Now even that may not be a problem. Be prepared for a future where you're totally connected to your past. Instantaneously.

[duerra]

I don't see any 160GB flash drive iPods out there, and the article you were referring to was talking about a new type of solid state drive similar to flash, not like the HDD-based iPods, so there's no comparison here. Your entire blog post was premised on comparing apples to oranges - hard drives vs. solid state media. I for one, am EAGERLY awaiting the next generation of solid state storage technology - do not be misinformed about the differences here!

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[MattRosoff]

Duerra: you are correct, this new type of storage is more analogous to flash. But, the article I linked to cited the 160GB iPod as the top, and I was merely pointing out that 500,000 songs isn't 100x that capacity.

For that matter, I don't see any 20GB flash iPod either...in fact, the largest capacity flash based iPod, is the 32GB touch. So doing rough math, that'd be about a 3.2TB drive. Amazing, but still not 500,000 songs, more like 780,000 or something.

Anyway, my big point is the implications: what happens when you start thinking of storage in TB instead of GB?

[shayes001]

O.k., folks. Does anyone remember the fact that MRAM is on the horizion and has already been tested? I don't remember all the facts, but I believe Motorola was involved and the storage size is quite massive. In fact, the elevator pitch on this stuff was Terabytes of memory on a single machine. Of course, the practical application they mentioned was downloading the entire internet prior to a flight or trip of sorts.

So, when I hear 500 GB, I have to chuckle because I know the future and it's already been exposed to the masses.

I worked at Sony for a short stint and they would bring in technology that would BLOW YOUR MIND, however, it took several years to see it. They told us at the time that what we were seeing was just what they were allowed to show internal employees.

Don't be wowed, please, by this. This is sooooo yesterday :-P

[DontLOLme]

Also since when has "MP3 player" been 100% interchangeable with "iPod"? Last I checked there are trillions upon billions of other devices.

"500,000 songs on a portable MP3 player"

"Today's iPod lineup contains no product advertised to hold 5,000 songs, so I'm not sure where the 500,000 figure came from."

You're new to this aren't you?