Hello terabytes: How much is enough
There was a time when a terabyte was something a vampire would inflict. Now the term is coming into the common parlance as data storage capacity requirements continue to grow.
And it is not just corporate information which is growing and multiplying inexorably like horror creature The Blob. The stuff you hold near and dear on your own PC or notebook (or Mac) also has alarming tendencies to start testing the screws holding your hard drive together.
So it is that we welcome in a significant milestone in hard drive technology as Hitachi rolls out a 1 terabyte disk drive.
A terabyte is a lot of GB, just over 1 000 to be a little more precise. When IBM introduced the first hard drive in 1956, it had a capacity of around 4.4 megabytes and could be leased as an integral component (although a refrigerator-sized component) of the RAMAC 305 computer for $3200 a month. Today’s 1TB disk will cost you around R3500, fits in the palm of your hand and stores 200000000 times more information. Good luck reading that number beginning with 2.
The inevitable question which will be asked, with slack jawed incredulity at just ‘how far we have come’, is, just how much more capacity will we be needing? The answer is that there will probably never be enough capacity. Remember the days of 6.4GB hard drives, and wondering how on earth you would ever need that much capacity? Before long, the same question worried our minds when we had 60GB hard drives.
The bottom line is that given capacity, we tend to use it up and then require more. Hitachi has already announced plans for a 4TB disk drive to be available just after the Soccer World Cup. Don’t bother wondering how you could possibly need that much capacity because you will find a way.
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