The Personal Terabyte Project
Magnetic disk drives are increasing in capacity at a rate of over 60%
per year, and dropping in price at a similar rate. Manufacturers
expect these trends to continue for at least a decade. In five to
eight years, magnetic disks will hold a terabyte of data. In
approximately ten years, the price of a terabyte of disk storage
should drop to a few hundred dollars, putting a terabyte of storage
into a typical home. We call this system a Personal Terabyte.
The Personal Terabyte Project at Georgia Tech is developing a set of
tools for managing and exploiting this massive personal data
repository.
Overview of Personal Terabyte Project: pdf
file or postscript
Our research to date focuses on three main areas:
1. Prefetching World Wide Web Data to avoid network delays
2. Prefetching Blocks from Disk to Memory to avoid page fault penalties
3. Backup and Reliability to protect against site disasters and
accidentally-deleted files
Other important research issues related to the personal terabyte
include:
1. Future disk architectures: network-attached disks, intelligent
disks, ...
2. File system organization for the Personal Terabyte
3. Indexing and Searching the Personal Terabyte
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. 9702609