i had a talk with my friend a while back about harddrives and file compression. he was talking about how hds are getting larger and larger. i told him that was great and all but its not needed unless you have cable or a hi speed internet setup.
now for those of you that dont have hi speed service yet, it may seem strange how someone could use a 20 or 40 or 60+gb drive. but trust me, once you get fat pipes youll be downloading everything you can. i could easliy download 500mb a day. sometimes more.[my cd burners in the mail]i have 100mb of hd space on my 9.5gb. i have probably download and deleted 1gb or more stuff in the last 6 months, i just had too because i couldnt toss my porn and my mp3s.
anyways...
i said that file compression was 10x more important than hd size. i asked him if it was theoretically possible to compress a huge file [say 50mb] to just a few killobytes, and he said no with a long technical reply about data sectors and kernels, etc.
now no matter your download speed, having a file be smaller will bennifit everyone who downloads. it would totaly be a better investment working on software that compressed a file 25 times than spending money designing 100gb ata133 drives.