Tags: Consumer Electronics, Hardware Solutions, Technology Industry
By Alexander Villafania
PASIG CITY, METRO MANILA – External hard drives are pushing the boundaries of capacity. Today, you can even buy a 2 terabyte (or 1,000 gigabytes) hard drive, already more than enough space for your music or videos.
But in today’s high definition world the sizes of multimedia file types such as videos, pictures, music are getting bigger. For instance, a photo taken from even a 12 megapixel digital camera can be as big as 18 megabytes when uncompressed. When saved as a .PNG file, it can still be a sizeable 7 Mb.
Most ordinary digital camera owners take dozens of photos on default settings, which translate to a huge memory requirement especially when all the photos are stored on a hard disk.
And we’re not even talking about videos here.
People are also taking videos using their digital cameras. Some of these cameras can already take videos on HD resolution – between the lowest HD type of 720p (progressive) to the 1080p, the current highest HD standard.
A two-minute 1080p video encoded as an MPEG-4 (or .mp4) file can already consume 200 megabytes space, which means a 250Gb hard disk can run out of space after at least 2 hours of video recording.
Paolo Manzano, managing editor of Hardware Magazine Philippines, says media-rich files particularly videos are pushing the bar when it comes to hard disk space.
The Internet, he says, is now being harnessed as an effective medium for sharing of these media files. This means that more people are downloading and saving files on their hard disks, as well as creating content that they want to show to others as well.
This sentiment is also shared by Jing Garcia, Tech Times editor of Manila Times. He says the proliferation of broadband Internet also makes it possible for people to download multimedia files on their PCs. With this kind of demand, Garcia says the cost of hard disk space will continue to go down. “In 1996, a 980Mb drive cost me P5000. The same amount now can buy you a terabyte,” he says.
Again, we’re not even taking about video games here.
Current video games take advantage of the hardware capabilities of a personal computer, such as its processor, RAM, and video card capabilities. Every additional hardware power requires additional lines of code in the software, which adds to its space requirements.
Some games are already requiring a minimum of 15Gb of hard disk space. Some games also have online functions that let players download updates and other files from the Internet and these also require additional space.
Playground Magazine Managing Editor Relly Carpio says game graphics is what drives the change in size. Games used to be placed in several CDs but that changed with the advent of DVDs that had bigger capacity. Still, video game sizes continue to grow and so some game developers have started to increase the number of DVDs to accommodate the installation file of just one game. Carpio says this essentially requires additional memory space.
Because of the memory space requirements of video games (and of course, the growing sizes of multimedia files) the transfer capabilities of hard disks and their ability to run for a sustained period also has to be considered.
Adrian Rodriguez of Microsoft says the transfer speed is crucial for video games as these should enhance the experience of gamers. “Gamers do tend to save the original installation file of the games so space becomes important,” he says.
Noel Timbol, the business development manager in the Philippines of hard disk manufacturer Western Digital says the demand continues to grow in the country due in large part to the size requirements of multimedia files, games and the increasing bandwidth of Internet services. The company already introduced their “Velociraptor” internal hard disk, which has a capacity of 600Gb, as well as a 6 gigabit per second transfer rate – twice as fast as regular hard disks.
“We’re banking on this growth. There’s a lot of potential in the hard disk space business,” Timbol says.
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