Your own Terabyte

BillChin · Post by **BillChin** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 11:58 am

from
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercuryn ... 393511.htm

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...

gonzo914 · Post by **gonzo914** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 5:40 pm

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 --

-- and it still managed to land the lunar module.

Congratulations · Post by **Congratulations** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 7:12 pm

gonzo914 wrote:and humanities majors usually get to have a lot more sex than EE majors

Yes.

Azalin · Post by **Azalin** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 7:58 pm

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.

Post by **Dale** » Sat Jan 06, 2007 8:10 pm

gonzo914 wrote:And if you have approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, you have a yikeahootabyte.[/img]

That's a yikesahootiebyte.

Wanderer · Post by **Wanderer** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 1:09 am

gonzo914 wrote:II still don't know exactly what a byte is

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.

Azalin · Post by **Azalin** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 2:01 pm

Have you ever heard that one?

There's 10 types of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't .

peeplj · Post by **peeplj** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 2:27 pm

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.

That's my $.02.

--James

Azalin · Post by **Azalin** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 3:44 pm

peeplj wrote: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.

That's my $.02.

--James

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.

Wanderer · Post by **Wanderer** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 6:25 pm

Another example to put things in perspective.
Most of my MP3 audio files are between 3 and 6 megabytes.

That means a 1 terabyte hard drive will hold about 167,000 to 333,000 songs.

Daniel_Bingamon · Post by **Daniel_Bingamon** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 8:29 pm

Windows Vista Second Generation will probably occupy 1/3 of the drive space and take two days to load on a 2.5 GHz processor.

_.. .- -. .. . .-.. -... .. -. --. .- -- --- -.

djm · Post by **djm** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 9:51 pm

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.

djm

Denny · Post by **Denny** » Sun Jan 07, 2007 11:17 pm

Daniel_Bingamon wrote:Windows Vista Second Generation will probably occupy 1/3 of the drive space and take two days to load on a 2.5 GHz processor.

_.. .- -. .. . .-.. -... .. -. --. .- -- --- -.

ever the optimist!

fearfaoin · Post by **fearfaoin** » Mon Jan 08, 2007 9:33 am

gonzo914 wrote: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....

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.

Wanderer · Post by **Wanderer** » Mon Jan 08, 2007 9:46 am

fearfaoin wrote:
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.

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