Overheard: Do you really need a 4 terabyte hard drive? YES!

“The Library of Congress has 20.5 million cataloged books in its classification system. Half that collection would just about fit inside the desktop computers we’ll be able to buy four years from now.” Eric Gwinn, Incredible shrinking hard drive

Eric writes: We”re all going to want higher-capacity hard drives to handle the hours of high-definition video we’ll be shooting with our HD video cameras in the next few years. We already know there’s no way to guess what other media will come into our everyday lives.

Eric is right, although I’d argue that there’s a lot of people who wanted those higher capacity hard drives YESTERDAY. Anyone who’s ever worked with video knows that the success of YouTube is fundamentally based on compression and storage. Sure, they make it easy to share videos — but the real value is being able to offload those gi-normous video files and reclaim your storage space.