> I don't know. That address space is very much larger than all the storage every produced in human history.
Not a chance. 64 bit is ca 16 exabytes.
Currently, the shipping volume of harddrives is about 500 million units/year. If we're generous and say that their average storage size is only 100GB, despite the large number of models in the 1TB-5TB segment, then that's 50 million TB/year, or about 50 exabytes of harddrive capacity per year. In reality it's likely much higher, and rising rapidly.
Yes, the number sounds big, but so did 1TB just a few years ago. And 1GB just a few years before that. It's not that long ago we were marvelling over even being able to buy 20MB hd's for home use. The number may sound outrageous, but my experience based on actual product availability is that we should expect a factor of 1000+ rises in storage capacity per 10-15 years, and I see no evidence to justify a slowdown.
And increases in capability causes changes in how we engineer things. When petabyte sized databases becomes possible for more people at reasonable price points, you'll see a lot of people that previously "made do" with terabyte sized databases find all kinds of uses for extra analysis etc., or simply storing more intermedia stages and being more wasteful because we can.
That's not true at all... A 64 bit system can address up to 16 exabytes of data... Google's datacenters (in 2013) estimated data storage was 15 exabytes.
