Stop asking, "Who will ever need that much storage?"

Seriously. Over at Tech Target, Sonia R. Lelii writes about Cleversafe Inc and their 10 exabyte (10¹⁸ bytes) storage system. Now, I know she isn't actually asking that question. But, the indication that this question should ever be asked just will not go away. Before this, some asked the same question about gigabytes, and then terabytes, and then petabytes. There is no reason to expect this to end. Data storage continues to multiply exponentially. Ok, I give you that it has to end some point before the representation of all atoms in the observable universe, but we are nowhere near that number of 10⁸⁰. Granted, all of the worlds information is only on the order of hundreds of exabytes right now, but it pales in comparison to even the number of atoms in a single person 7x10²⁷ or the number of bacteria on the earth (okay, technically prokaryotes aren't exclusively bacteria, sheesh!) 5x10³⁰. Anyway, the point is that in a few years I don't want to hear anyone say, "Who is ever going to need a zettabyte of storage?"