I read an assertion in an article a few days ago that within a decade we would have personal music players capable of holding every music recording ever made --

I read an assertion in an article a few days ago that within a decade we would have personal music players capable of holding every music recording ever made -- which struck me as unlikely, but I was curious how close it was. After all, as the article points out, we currently have 2.5 inch drives that hold 0.3 terabytes... One (conservative) estimate of the amount of commercially available music is six million songs (http://boingboing.net/2008/02/18/worlds-most-complete.html http://boingboing.net/2008/02/18/worlds-most-complete.html). At about three minutes each, that's 18 million minutes, or 34 years of songs. Encoded at approximately a megabyte a minute, that's 18 terabytes. If storage space on a hard drive continues to double every two years, we should have 20 terabyte 2.5 inch drives in about 12 years. So "music players with every song within a decade" are at least within the bounds of possibility. Of course, no electronics company has an incentive to sell music players that big, so you'd need a service like the one in the article to build it. :)