The Data Space Race

Recently I have found myself nostalgic for old video game systems, notably the Nintendo 64. I am not an avid video game player, and so this desire to play games on these older systems surprises me, much like having a craving for some food I do not normally eat. My hunt for the Nintendo 64, which I thought might be hiding somewhere in my basement, was unsuccessful. In fact, as I remembered in the midst of my search, my older brother had taken it and the many clunky game cartridges with him out to California when he moved out there. I suppose he had been nostalgic, just as I have been, for this antiquated video game console. My hunt did bear fruit, however, just not the kind I was looking for. From among the many boxes in my basement, I found a PlayStation 2 with several of its games.

Sly 2, one of my favorite games as a kid, was one of of the games I found alongside the console, and one which I have not played in many years. I hooked the console up to the television in my living room, popped in Sly 2, and flipped the inconveniently placed power switch on the back of the console after sitting momentarily confused as the power button was not obviously visible.

Playing the game now, as a student of Computer Science with knowledge of the internal working components of a computer, it is astounding to see how terrific the game is given the console’s physical limitations. Like many other things, technological or not, we take for granted the vast space and computational power of our everyday devices.

The memory card that my PlayStation 2 uses to save the states of all the games I play has a capacity of 8 MB and is roughly 4 square inches. The CD-ROM disks on which many of these games reside can hold around 750 MB. Contrast this with the 200 GB MicroSD card released by SanDisk earlier this year, which is about ¼ of a square inch. By direct comparison, that’s 25,000 times the amount of space on the PlayStation 2 memory card in 1/16 of the surface area.

Naturally, we have been gradually finding more ways to consume the virtually limitless space offered to us as media files grow in quality and consequently in size, as businesses automatically collect and store heaps of information, and as we refuse to delete anything because we simply don’t need to. The reality often unrealized is that the digital resources we consume are no different from natural ones which we consciously strive to preserve.

This is not to say that we are facing an imminent danger of depleting our digital storage space or are approaching “datageddon” as Silicon Valley character Gavin Belson calls it. However, legitimate concerns have been raised regarding our data storage habits. It is estimated that by 2020, there will be 5,200 GB of data for every person on earth or 14 times the amount of data currently managed by enterprise datacenters, but the number of IT professionals is only expected to increase by a factor of 1.5.

So how do we prepare for the coming challenges of data storage? Businesses have been and will continue to shift towards service-oriented architectures, allowing for automatic provisioning of resources. Individuals should be more conscious of what they store and keep efficiency in mind. Perhaps we should marvel at how Nintendo managed to squeeze Super Mario 64 into a 64 MB game cartridge and seek to fit more data into less virtual space, rather than praise SanDisk for creating the 200 GB MicroSD card and allowing us to store more data in less physical space. The data space race is afoot and we must be mindful of our digital resources in order to maintain them for the years to come.