Just when you got used to hard drives with hundreds of gigabytes (hundreds of billions of bytes) they do it: make one with a terabyte (a trillion bytes). You can now get a terabyte hard drive on a desktop PC. Dell is offering a 1T Hitachi drive for $500.
In case you’re wondering, as printed text a terabyte would occupy 100 million reams of paper, consuming some 50,000 trees. It is enough to hold 16 days (not hours) of DVD-quality video, or a million pictures, or almost two years worth of continuous music.
Incidentally, for planning purposes, the next level is the petabyte (a quadrillion bytes); and then the exabyte (one quintillion bytes); and then the zettabyte (one sextillion bytes); and then the yottabyte (one septillion bytes.)
This is of particular note since I have spent my entire career in the desktop computer industry. I started out in 1985 assembling original IBM PCs with a 10 MB hard drive and populating AST 6 Pak expansion boards with memory chips so they would have 640KB of RAM. Man, those were the days!
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Thursday, April 12, 2007
Who Says Size Doesn't Matter?
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In case you’re wondering, as printed text a terabyte would occupy 100 million reams of paper, consuming some 50,000 trees. It is enough to hold 16 days (not hours) of DVD-quality video, or a million pictures, or almost two years worth of continuous music.
Or your porn collection.
My first time was with a Vic 20, which similarly had a cassette drive. Only a scant 25 years ago.
Did I say only? Did I say scant?
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