Freaking terabytes.

I'm sure this is old hat to some of you, but I just upgraded my PC's storage. I now own a Terabyte. A whole goddamn terabyte, all to myself. My mind is still boggling at how big this is.

It's ten times the size of the old drive it's supplementing. Okay, fine.
It's 50 times the size of the one that got me through most of university.
It's 500 times the size of the one in the super-hot gaming rig I lugged to LAN parties all over the eastern U.S. & Canada in my teens.
It's ten freaking thousand times the size of the one in my first PC that I bought with my own money when I was 12.
It would hold over six million diskettes for the first computer I ever used, the Commodore 64 my parents got when I was one. Now we're getting into numbers the human mind can't really imagine so they just sound like statistical mumbojumbo. Let's switch gears...

If I launched Audacity (a sound file editor), set it to save directly to internet-quality MP3 (128 kb/s), and hit "record", it would take over two goddamn years before I got an 'out of disk space' error. If I were recording 360p streaming video, it would take 132 days.

A paperback book has about 400 words per page, or maybe 2000 characters. In ASCII encoding (1 byte per character, no compression or optimization), my new drive could hold 2.2 million 250-page paperback books. Dangit, that's another one of those silly abstract numbers.

Well, the internets say a 250 page book weighs 120~200 grams, so let's call it 160 g for simplicity. I grabbed a pretty typical looking one and it was exactly 17.5 x 10.5 x 1.6 cm (at 246 pages.) That gives us a 294 cc book with a density of 0.54 g/cc. If you launched 2.2 million of those books into space, they would form a sphere with a diameter of around 10.7 meters. That sphere would mass 352 000 kg and have a surface gravity of 0.00000002 x Earth's, which sounds minuscule but is easily measurable with common gravimeter instruments. If an object floated in space above this "planet" of books, it would accellerate in an hour to roughly 2.5 meters/h due to the gravitational pull. That's not going to win any records but, if you were hanging around watching, you could totally see it happen.

That's accelleration at normal, human perceptible rates and timescales. Due to gravity. Of a ball of information. Which could alternately fit on my hard drive.

Did I mention this terabyte wonder is a 2.5", 9.5 mm, sub-$100 laptop drive? Because right now, if you want desktop-sized, you can go buy one that holds four.

Absurd.

I had a C64. I could start loading a game on that 5 1/4 drive, go get a drink, and come back. Now they measure seek speed in nanoseconds.

I honestly don't know how many terabytes we have just for photo storage at the magazine--probably a bunch-- but, yeah, it's amazing how far we have come. Then there's the scary thing that I have a duplicate of that file here on my desk at home.

I just read an article that said Petabyte drives would be the next big thing.

1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes

In fifth grade or so, we got to use Commodore PETs. Storage was on an audio cassette. How far we have come.

I had something like this on the wall at some point. Recently saw a talk at a conference for a Canadian cancer center which has a 18 petabyte storage bank. All flat sequence data. IE "ATGC" nothing else. All of SoLiD sequences. how you even crunch through that I have no idea.

i bought my first pc in the fall of 1998.. it was a Dell that i ordered with the optional 10GB hard drive. i knew nothing about computers, but a couple of computer savvy friends were envious of all that storage space i had.. around that time, it was a big deal to buy a gig's worth of Zip drive disks..

I vividly remember how cool I thought I was when I added the second 20MB MFM hard drive to my bitchen 286-16 WITH a 287 Math co processor. That sucker was a monster that could not only hold windows 3.0 but a full copy of Geoworks for dual boot amazingness.

Now I don't care. If it manages to browse the web, store my MP3's and collect emails then this 8 year old POS is just fine. The bleeding edge is over rated.

http://www.techspot.com/news/47146-victorinox-unveils-swiss-army-knife-with-an-lcd-and-1tb-of-storage.html

How about this? Not sure why anyone would buy that though lol

Yes Jay, but if you're running Windows you really need a terabyte, because in 3-years time it will half-full with just Windows Updates.

The NSA had a terabyte of "near online" storage in 1963. Think about that.

Somewhat related- In 2007 I got a job at an Audi dealership and I was advised by my coworkers to get a memory stick so I could transfer reports from the worlds worst scan tool to the workstation computer. Once I came home and my wife (a programmer) explained what a "memory stick" was and got done laughing we went to Target. I didnt have any clue what size I would need so we picked out a 1gig that was on sale for 20 bucks. I remember looking at the chart on the back of the package showing how many photos etc that would fit in utter amazement. And for only 20 buckaroos!

Fast forward to today and I regularly deal in files larger than a gig for work, I bought a terabyte portable external harddrive for work that was around 60 bucks and an 8 terabyte stick for less than 5.

Its enough to make me want to go hand dig a well in the back yard so I am prepared when it all comes crashing down!

ditchdigger wrote: I vividly remember how cool I thought I was when I added the second 20MB MFM hard drive to my bitchen 286-16 WITH a 287 Math co processor. That sucker was a monster that could not only hold windows 3.0 but a full copy of Geoworks for dual boot amazingness. Now I don't care. If it manages to browse the web, store my MP3's and collect emails then this 8 year old POS is just fine. The bleeding edge is over rated.

I'm with you on this. I had a similar first-computing experience, and I remember being proud several years later that my supertweaked AMD 386 was faster than my friends' 486s... but now? Web browsing, e-mail. movies, and video editing. I don't care about the nuts and bolts as long as it does what I want.

This must be what it's like to be a car guy who used to be a hotrodder but just leases a beige Accord now.

Terabyte is such a cool term. I just got a new computer at work and it's got a terabyte RAID array on board, plus I have another terabyte RAID drive plugged into it. That's four terabytes of actual storage space. Plus two 24" widescreen monitors. Considering that this was my first computer upgrade in about 8 years, I'm still boggled. It's not even bleeding edge, it cost less than my first Pentium did.

My first computer was a VIC-20 with a cassette drive - I still have at least one of the tapes. I learned to program on a PET, though.

Both of my 250G hdd's crapped out once I got the computer out of storage when building the house. Replaced them with a 1TB hdd and a spare 160 GB hdd that I've used forever. Just had a bunch of pics and random stuff on there. Moved the whole 160 GB to the TB and it didn't hardly register on the bar of usage. I was impressed. Now to fill it with car pictures and porn!!!

Pedobytes!? Isn't the internet already dangerous enough for our children?!

Yeah it's awesome how HD space advances logarythmically over time. Just think, in 5 - 10 years everyone will be angling for more space, because their drives are full. 15 years ago, my dad's computer friend thought he was insane for buying a 3GB secondary drive, when his computer's original 300MB drive was so big "you'll never fill it in your life!" 5 years later (about) a 7GB hard drive was "an absolute beast" in my brother's words. 4 years ago a friend of mine has 2 TB (4 500gb drives) and I thought he was crazy. Now I have to manage space carefully because one of my drives burned up, leaving me with only 3TB and like 10% total free space. Meanwhile my pirate-buddy has less than 5% free space from a total 6TB (rated by drive manufacturers in decimal, the jerks) of space.

I think a lot of this space filling stems from unneccessary stuff on the computer. Nobody needs all of those movies, especially when he's got them on DVD, but the real space filler are TV series. Think about it. One movie = 2 hrs of video (roughly). One TV series, say, the Simpsons, has 20-25 episodes, call it 22, each about 20 minutes in length. It's usually a little more, but I suck at math so i'm going with 20. That's 7 hours and 20 minutes of video. Let's say there is only 20 seasons of the wayyy longer show on the hard drive, that's 146 hours and 40 minutes of video, and its only part of one show. That's enough to watch the simpsons for 12 hours a day, for nearly 2 weeks straight without any repeats. Assuming it's in decent resolution, that's a binary crapload of space. That and digital cameras are recording larger and larger file sizes/taking HD video at higher framerates. Add that to trigger happy idiots like me who take a thousand photos with the stupid thing every time i turn it on and that makes for some quickly filling hard drives. Hard to think that last sony point and shoot survived a 10 foot fall and 35,000 photos before being replaced, still working, by a newer camera.

Right now, there about 6TB in use here in my office - 4TB in the home server and another 2TB in the Mac I'm typing this on. Plus probably another 1.2TB that are currently offline...

It's amazing how much crap one stores these days.

We have come a long way from the first computer I bought:

My high end video servers, recording mega pixel IP video, come with as much as 30TB memory. Required because of the massive data coming from those cameras. And not too many years ago we were using VCRs. Times have changed.

I have 5 TB of external storage at home...its about three quarters full.

Take the battery cover off your phone and unmount your micro sd card. There it sits, on your fingertip. 32 gig, in that tiny sliver of plastic. That right there blows me away. That's more storage than my first 3 desktop PCs had, combined..

My Paw worked at one of the biggest data processing places in LA in the seventies. They did accounts for socal edison, bank of america, UCLA, a theater chain, at least a dozen other huge businesses, payroll/accounting/all manner of info work, on a mainframe. Everyone was quite impressed that that one machine could handle all that data. It was state of the art. It had 64k of RAM.

I'm not much of a computer geek ... matter of fact most would refer to me as a luddite ... but my first computer was an 8088 w/ a 10 M hard drive and a 10 M clock ... things HAVE changed a bit over the yrs

My first computer was an Osbourne 1 and it had a whopping 64k of ram, no HD and two single sided floppies. 1981, I still have it. I was shocked a while back when I found one on display at the Smithonian.

"Good old days" my left nut.

jg

This is when you could get a Japanese two-seater funmobile for $10kish.

How much does a 370Z cost? How about a BRZ? Willing to spend 1/4 of that for a hard drive?

I have this old Compaq, it still boots! With floppy, of course...

It must weigh 30lbs, yet it was considered portable. I was told they were nearly 5-grand in 1983, so I can see why you'd want to take it places with you.