Terrabyte Of Data On Your Keychain This Year?

No question, this report by reliable source Shelly Palmer from CES this year got my attention. If true, I'd like to make a flash-drive necklace with my 100 top movies on it:

During CES week, the HD DVD v. BluRay war was called in favor of BluRay. This may be premature or it may be right on the money – in truth, it would be great to have a single optical solution for HD storage. But, while everyone at the show was taking sides and talking trash, some people might have missed the other big story at CES – solid state memory

You know your jump drive (the little USB thingy you have on your key chain)? It could be up to 8GB, but it’s probably a smaller model. Well, several manufacturers were showing prototypes of jump drive and SSD (Solid State Disc) technologies up to 832GB. Yes, you read it right, almost a Terabyte of data could be hanging on your keychain within a very few months.

What will that mean to you? Well a standard DVD holds one movie and some additional material in 4.7GB and BluRay disc holds about four times as much. But, if you compress a movie to about 2GB where it still looks good, you can imagine a world where any given teenager could be walking around with over 400 full length, HD feature films, 1,200 standard definition films, 2,000 hours of television or 250,000 songs on their iPod or hanging on a keychain or lanyard. Current technology would not allow a consumer to transfer all of that data very easily (and what exactly would you be transferring it to anyway) so thinking about a world where your jump drive, or whatever it will be called, contains $5,000 worth of content, you can easily foresee a business in wearable art, jewelry or some other accoutrement keeps your data close to you and makes it hard to lose.

IBM was showing a proprietary USB key (again it doesn’t work with anything that anyone else makes) that can download a 1.9GB HD feature film in under 60 seconds. Solid state memory uses very little electricity compared to traditional hard discs, they also have no moving parts to break. This kind of massive, passive storage capacity will effect a true sociological change. Imagine walking around with that amount of data in a wireless P2P environment, it would truly change the way we do life."