Hitachi will debut the industry’s first terabyte hard drive, selling it for $400 by March as an add-on for computers. It will also produce a version that could be built into digital video recorders such as those from TiVo Inc. and rivals.
A terabyte can hold the text of roughly 1 million books; 1,000 hours of standard-definition video; 250 hours of high-definition video; or a quarter million songs - that’s two year’s of music without hearing the same song twice, according to Hitachi.
A person could live an entire lifetime and not be expose to that much text. A million books is 10,000 each year for one hundred years. Of course these days, it is all about video so 250 hours will probably be filled with one year’s worth of baby videos and the consumer will by another terabyte next year…
I’m a humanities major, and I was having trouble wrapping my head around those numbers, so I read up on it and went to ciphering on my own. I still don’t know exactly what a byte is (I don’t think anybody really does except EE majors, and humanities majors usually get to have a lot more sex than EE majors), but I do know you can count them and store them.
If you have approximately 1,000 of them, you have a kilobyte.
If you have approximately 1,000,000 of them, you have a megabyte.
If you have appriximately 1,000,000,000 of them, you have a gigabyte.
If you have approximately 1,000,000,000,000 of them, you have a terabyte.
If you have approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000 you have a bazillabyte.
And if you have approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, you have a yikesahootabyte.
By contrast, this little gizmo had only 74 kilobytes of hard-wired storage and another 4 kilobytes of something that was kind of like RAM –
The most interesting stuff coming up on memory technology is the new 32GB and and above flash memory cards that will allow laptops, for example, to have flash memory instead of hard drivers. I heard booting Windows XP on a flash drive takes half the time it takes on a hard drive, and also memory consumes less power.
The best setup I’d like to have is a flash drive for my OS, and a hard disk for the data.
A byte is one unit of information, 8 bits long. Typically, every letter you type takes up one byte (unless we’re talking unicode..dont’ get me started)
Your average novel will fit on a floppy disk, being between 1 million and 1.4 million “characters” (letters) uncompressed. or about 1 megabyte. That means one terabyte will hold about a million novels.
In uncompressed format, most DVDs are 8 gigabytes. 1 terabyte will hold about 125 uncompressed DVD movies, or about 250-400 movies if you shrink them a little and lose some quality.
This is cool, but if you’re going to spend the money to get that kind of storage, get several smaller drives.
The more spindles you spread your data across, the better your performance; also, with multiple drives and a RAID controller you can trade off various levels of perforamance vs fault tolerance.
I think it’s the thing to do if you are running servers, but if you’re only a home user, you want to use the least space possible, and consume the least power.
When we all start editing our own HD home movies in surround sound I expect those extra bits of storage will come in handy. In the meantime, I suspect they will sit better on large servers.
You don’t have to approximate. Computers, being binary creatures,
do everything in powers of 2. When storage numbers got large
enough that we had to start abbreviating those numbers, folks
agreed upon the power of 2 which was nearest to the nice, round
decimal numbers where we traditionally abbreviated.
So, the closest we could get to 1000 is 2^10 which is 1024. We
called that a Kilobyte. And closest to 1,000,000 was 2^20, or
1,048,576 Bytes, which we call a Megabyte. So, a Terabyte ends
up being a good deal larger than 1,000,000,000,000 Bytes. (It’s
2^40 if your calculator can handle that…)
P.S. The symbol ^ means “raised to the power of”, or “exponent”
Sadly, this information does not have an effect on the ladies.
Actually, only computer professionals make the distinction. The rest of the world doesn’t. Go into a computer store and buy a 40 gigabyte hard drive, and you’ll find that it has about 2 million bytes less than the 42,949,672,960 bytes you think you’d get… heh
I was hoping to replace my server storage space with a terrabyte over Christmas, three 500GB drives in a RAID-5 array, however the new version of Debian Linux hasn’t been released yet and that’s what I had hoped to use.
I have all of my CDs ripped as mp3s, I’m planning on re-ripping them in a lossless format such as flac as well as the mp3 for use with gadgets.
I also have a good number of video files from net or my tivo, and once my wife and I have a child I’m sure we’ll start racking up the home movies too.
One day I’d like to rip all of my DVDs as I did with my CDs and replace my shelf of movies with a server and streaming box connected to the TV, but that’s a bit down the road.
The other night I was out with a helicopter engineer and a helicopter pilot. They got talking to this girl who was oh so impressed when she asked them what they did for a living, then it came to my turn:
“I’m in IT, I’m a web developer”
Instantly ignored for the rest of the conversation.
Damn them and their cool jobs.
On the flipside such knowledge is useful for getting rid of unwanted female attention.
I know it sounds unlikely, but there are occassions when you don’t want girls hitting on you. To clarify slightly, it wasn’t me that was being hit on but my married friend.
