....an external drive manufacturer supply something to stop you buying it products?

And also how much would you pitch it at? When you can get a 500gb drive for £50 from your supermarket, it's going to have to be bloody cheap (read almost free).

If they did they "heymacarena" version, I'd buy it :)

"Most of the images are on people's PCs"? Where do you get that?

A corporation that has to be compliant with document retention policies has terabytes upon terabytes upon terabytes of scanned OCR'd documents. A physics lab maintains petabytes of image data from experiments in bubble chambers. Astronomical research? petabytes as well.

This is not even to mention the M&E market segments which maintain petabytes of images, with tons of redundancy too (each picture frame in an animated HD movie has a lot going on with the surrounding picture frames).

Who the hell even wants to get near the consumer market with a 10 foot barge pole when there are so many untapped resources that can actually PAY the premium that such software requires? not to mention that CPU bound means exactly that - it means that you need a dedicated CPU (which is why AFAIK why Ocarina sells an appliance, not software) just for dedup if you want to get anything else done.

No no. Ocarina's business strategy is sound - deduping images on a phone is perhaps a good idea in 5,10,20 years when you have 50 terabytes of capacity on your phone and you're snapping pictures like a motherfucker, and the phone's CPU can support. For now, leave the damn thing where it fucking is.

Am I the only one who read this as 'Octarine'?

And what happens when Ocinara goes bust or gets bought? .. will their proprietary algorithms be supported for the life time of the disk or the operating system?

De-duplication is struggling to get past compliance and legal regulations based around the long term authenticity of data .. and you want us to trust our priceless personal memories to this? Next you will be suggesting we trust "Cloud" to do this for us also..

Your "brainwave" would have millions of people with the modern day equivalent of having all their content on 2.2" floppy drives.. useless.

Not very forward thinking are we Mr Mellor?

JPEG, MP3, MP4 / XVID / ZIP (emulators etc.) and most other common formats people have for *data* are already compressed.

Enabling drive compression on a 1.5tb drive saved around 1% of space here, not double.

If the software is recompressing images using a different, lossy technique then home users are unlikely to be happy when the image quality of their photographs or audio quality of their mp3s starts to degrade.

This type of thing is fine for business, with hundreds of documents, often in word, excel, text etc. formats, which compress well but for the most common media types people keep these days additional compression won't buy you much.