Moore’s Law (roughly) suggests that electronics double (capacity) every 18 – 24 months. I believe initially it had to do with the size and speed of transistors. Â But it’s held mostly true in my experience for processor speeds and hard drive capacities – every two years you get twice as much for the same price. Â By that math every 10 years you would have a 32x increase in speed and capacity. Â That means that if 1 TB hard drives are the typical size now by 2018 we’ll be buying 32 TB drives.
During my clean up I came across some old Sony memory sticks and was a little surprised at their capacities.  It didn’t seem that long ago that we were using these sticks but now all the sudden they seem quite small.  Even the large one here is only 128MB.  Upgrading to a new camera, the next memory stick I purchased after that one was 1GB.  The next one after that was 4GB.  I expect that at this rate we’re only a year away from having 32GB if not 64GB memory sticks and thumb drives.  It almost seems that flash memory is accelerating at a much higher rate than Moore’s Law would suggest. Actually, I predict that due to new memory technologies thumb drives and solid state hard drives will take a very large jump in capacity within the next year or two, leaping all the way into the 250GB to 1TB range.  What would that do to traditional hard drive technology which has been mostly following Moore’s law?  What happens when memory capacities become so large and so cheap that almost anyone can afford a practically limitless amount of memory?  What new products emerge?
What would you do with a infinite amount of storage space? Â Do you become a data pack rat? Â Would your storage look like a teenager’s bedroom with unorganized random files all over the place? Â Or do you build a data wonderland (ie., music and movies) with copies of everything all nicely organized in folders. Â What about dream products? Â A TiVo that can record multiple channels 24/7 and hold every show you ever care about forever? Â A 30 megapixel camera that records forever and doesn’t have a delete button? Â Oh wait, that could actually be bad.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that some smart people think that Moore’s Law can’t keep going forever. Â History has shown that so far it’s been the trend. Â Every time there’s a technological roadblock we see a small dip in the trend, but eventually some scientist figures out a way to get around it. Â Or they come up with a new approach. Â I see Moore’s Law not as the literal definition that Roger Moore um, Gordon Moore observed in 1965 about the actual size of transistors, but as an overall trend in scale/price/performance. Â Sometimes PCs are faster because we put more cores or processors in them for the same retail price. Â To me that counts as well.