"By 2015, we will be seeing applications that require a terabyte in your pocket, a petabyte in your home and exabytes in data centres," Couglin predicted. "One of the biggest drivers moving forward is going to be personal content.

"Recording every moment of your life on a mobile phone camera to create a 'life log' could rapidly increase demands for storage, he suggested. "There's no limit to the amount of storage that people can use."

Undermining the current war of words between Hitachi and Seagate over who can bring a one terabyte drive to market faster, Coughlin said that general consumers would not buy new drives purely based on size. "Consumers don't buy newer technology just because a product has a faster processor or more storage," he said.

Not everyone is convinced that such massive home storage is desirable. "I don't think I want a petabyte in my house," said Tom Inglefield, broadcast and entertainment solutions manager for Sun Microsystems. "I don't particularly like being a storage manager." Automated access to network-stored content may well be a preferable model for many home users, he said.

That could align with broader trends in consumer electronics, where individual users are increasingly abdicating management of content. JR: "Consumers generally aren't managing their disks," said IDC analyst John Rydning, pointing out that most iPod users rely on iTunes to manage their music and video files, rather than doing so themselves in a traditional operating system approach.
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