h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was wandering through a PC shop yesterday and I saw a disk drive on sale for about €340. It was 1 TB of storage space. That's a terabyte, a thousand gigabytes, a million megabytes.

It's seven million times the storage that there was on my first computer, and cheaper too.

blah blah blah not like it was in the old days mutter mutter

I don't even want to think about how much music and films and the like you'd need to fill that up.

In the old days it was like this

http://m3.bestpicever.com/pics/pic_11905866446435.JPG

You sure it was 'one' disk drive?

They seemed to have 'stalled' at 500 GB disks for quite a while, and all the 1TB disks I've seen for sale are actually 2 x 500 GB and a bit of selotape

How much is €340?

*pulls socks off*

Traveller in Time swimming
"I saw some 500G drives in a store a while ago. €99 each.

It takes about two months to get them filled "

How much storage was there in that drum kit? (link)

Well, in the Apple way of measuring capacity, 1TB is "240,000 songs". More importantly, it's more than 500,000 times the amount I've had published in the Edited Guide over the last seven years.

I wonder what the capacity of a human brain is.

Well, you'll just have to write more entries then, won't you?

The linked drumkit was 1 GB.

I never heard of anyone's brain being full. I'd go for "unlimited capacity" myself

Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes) once asked his teacher "Can I go home now? My brain is full".

I think Steven Pinker (in How the Mind Works) said it isn't a fillable quantity. It gets organised, not filled.

*currently listening to 30G ipod and filled with some sort of awe*

My brain's full. Every tome I learn something new, I forget something. The other day I read onne of Gnomon's Guide Entries and forgot the way home.

It occurs to me that the cheapness of Terabyte storage carries a new risk. You can now get your entire life's worth of data on a single device. What if it breaks?

I hope that everybody keeps at least two copies of their data.

Possibly a vain hope. And with downloading incresingly the source of our data, backups are something that can easily fall by the wayside.

There'll be tears before bedtime, mark my words.

>You can now get your entire life's worth of data on a single device. What if it breaks?

Ah, sure, there's room on one of those to back up your life's data twice or three times over!

"That's a terabyte, a thousand gigabytes, a million megabytes."

But only 977 million kilobytes. Personally I'm holding out for a petabyte, or possibly an exabyte.

There'll be one along shortly.

Traveller in Time counting
"Are you sure ?

It took nearly a decade to go from 1GB to 1TB. Moore suggests it will be five years for 1PB and nearly ten for 1EB. "