Ok, listen. I’m looking at a magazine ad for a USB thumb drive that stores 8GB. As all of you who have owned computers since the early 80s will understand–it boggles the mind to think that we could be at the point that you can carry 8GB on your keychain. 60 GB in your IPOD. Etc.
So, what’s the best way of trying to think about how much information a gigabyte is? (Not to mention a terrabyte. That’s 1000 GB, right?). How much text, for example, is a gigabyte? If 1k is about a half page, then a megabyte is 500 pages. A GB would be 500,000 pages. A terabyte would be 500,000,000 pages. An 8GB thumb drive would hold 4,000,000,000 pages?? Is that right or am I being stupid?
If I’m being stupid, how many bytes of information do you suppose my brain is handling?
Dale
P.S. You’ll see as my avatar that I just saw an ad for an 8GIG flash card. Even weirder to see than the somewhat bulkier thumb drive.
Also, you’re mixing different kinds of GB here… for hardware usually 1GB = 1000MB, 1MB = 1000KB and 1KB = 1000B but for software the conversion usually is 1 = 1024, not 1000.
BTW: I use computers since early 90s and what really impressed me at first when flash memory came out is that it doesn’t make any noise… well that still impresses me every time I remember it… I just love that silence I remember those incredible noisy 40gb hard drives…
I rip my mp3s at 192kbps, which is higher than most people. That being said, a five-minute mp3 on my computer runs right at 7MB. So, under the assumption that 1GB=1000MB (which is not always true, as has been said), 1GB is about 714.3 minutes, or nearly 12 hours of audio. If you were to use a smaller sample rate for your audio, that number would be higher still.
So from google it appears that a reasonable estimate for the average book length is about 80,000 words. Another search says the average word length is 4.26 characters per word. So, say 350,000 characters per book. Also, let’s assume one byte per character since we’re dealing with English word length.
Say 8GB is 8x10^9 bytes, divide by 350,000 and you get about 24,000 books on a 8GB storage devices.
Now, you don’t get all that space just for data, the file system takes up quite a bit of space, and if you’re storing books in unicode (If they’re in japanese or tibetan) you may need two bytes per characters.
Given all this, let’s say you can store 10,000-20,000 books on your new thumb drive, more if they’re cheesy detective novels less if they college textbooks in japanese.
Just an advise: Never keep important data ONLY in a flash drive, since their life is limited and all of them WILL die suddenly. I can’t remember now how many times you can write on them before “expiration”… but always have a backup elsewhere.
Of course this also happens with hard drives, but the way they die is usually different… HDs usually have a slow death but flash drives, in my experience, have had always a sudden death.
Yeah, each cell in a flash drive can be written to only a limited number of times, something on the order of 10,000 to 100,000 times. Good enough to use to carry stuff around but not enough to rely on!
Hm. Ok, let’s think about a 400GB Hard Drive. According to your estimates, a 400GB hard drive could hold up to about 1 million books. So, if there really were 1 million books in a Books-a-Million and they were all digitized, you could carry the whole store around on a single hard drive. Which, by the way, is exactly what I’m planning to do.
Which, by the way, > is exactly what I’m planning to do.
Well ignore “War and Peace”, forget “Lord of the Rings”, don’t even think about Trollope, and in the name of God steer well away from Joyce - Ulysess is cool - but that “Finnegans Wake” is dangerous.
American academics write books, huge long books, about the apostrophe in the title.
I like a good Robert Ludlum myself.
