Hello terabytes: How much is enough

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.
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What's difficult about reading Two Hundred Million? Oh, and a 1TB drive can be had for around R2500 already ;)
 
BobbyMac said:
What's difficult about reading Two Hundred Million? Oh, and a 1TB drive can be had for around R2500 already ;)
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Reminds myself of the time when I bought a 250Mb drive for R500 - the following month a 500Mb drive could be bought for R500... :(

hectic times... :D
 
BobbyMac said:
What's difficult about reading Two Hundred Million? Oh, and a 1TB drive can be had for around R2500 already ;)
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He can't be referring to a laptop drive, Hitachi only recently came out with a 320GB. I guess he must be talking about a 3.5 inch drive. That R2500 must be for a 16MB cache drive and not the 32MB one?
 
... Don’t bother wondering how you could possibly need that much capacity because you will find a way.
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The truth is that one does not need to 'find a way'. That has already been done for us by the ICT industry.

The 'trick' comes into play when one realises a way to make money by providing a 'need' before a 'want'. Before Windows 95, games worked very well under DOS and the requirements (albeit limited at the time) was sufficient. Then came the teething problems and eventually Direct-X matured and games using the higher spec requirements of Windows multitasking and improved memory management started paying off dividends.

Still, no need to stop there as more money needed to be made and nobody buys something new when what they have will suffice. Faster processing, better graphics, superior sound, improved realism was slowly introduced and all had it's own demands in terms of cost and storage requirement. The days of games coming fully loaded on a single floppy disk were long gone.

Today, digital content which needs huge storage requirements for games and movies are the norm. A standard single-sided DVD disc can store 4.7GB of data and with the emergence of High-Definition DVD / Blu-Ray it has shot up to around 50GB on average for a single disc. Now is the time to introduce TB harddrives - people need more storage space to film / record / import video and edit on their computers before exporting to optical media. Media Centres with the ability to stream content via the internet / LAN / WAN cannot function properly when there is little storage space unless you constantly delete data to free more space (as impractical as that becomes).

The bottomline is that technology is merely used as an extention to human nature: To use and abuse. We consume resources and simply find ways to obtain more and more and more instead of looking at better ways to re-use what we already have. At some point the law of diminishing return will hit us again and then the next 'evolutionay' step will be discovered and we move onto 100QB bio-optic drives or whatever it may be. What will we ever need that much storage space for? ... virtual reality simulators ala Star Trek perhaps?
 
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*remembers his first computer with its 20Mb HDD*

Those were the days :)

Now I already have about 1.5 Terabytes of storage and it's nowhere near enough :rolleyes:
 
i remember when i got my first pc. Came with a 3.2gig hdd. I felt i was the king back then :D
 
Ivan... said:
That is by far the most unfunny/horrid thing I have read in a while..
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agreed. a terabyte was always a terabyte... the author probably just assumed these terms are only connected with hard drive space
 
At the Telkom approved rate of 3GB per month, it'll take about 28 years to fill one of those...
 
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