The Terabyte Hardrive

Scapler wrote:   The professional community has had terabyte storage systems befoire this, this hardrive is just the first commercial one

Not really the first system, but definitely the first commercially available terabyte single disk. I'm pretty much satisfied with my internal 120GB and external 250GB though (120 for dual boot Windows/Linux, 250 is half music, half technical documentation for my job).

Jimbo wrote: Honestly, does anyone really need a terabyte harddrive? Don't think so. I think it's ridiculous that nowadays people seem to have huge amounts of (useless) data/music on their computer. 10-100 gb should be entirely sufficient to most people, but instead of settling for that, they download huge amounts of music they're never going to listen to. A friend of mine has 250gb of music on his computer, and despite being an avid music listener, he just admitted the other day that he's never listened to at least half of them. Maybe it's just me, but the whole phenomenon seems silly and completely pointless.

Well not if you just store music. But games nowadays are a whole different story. You'd think BG1 was big in the old days which took up about 3Gb in space. Well guess what! Oblivion, for example, is 5Gb and NWN2 is 6! You can imagine that having just 5 such games on your pc already cost you 30Gb. Not to mention probable mods and savegames(which take up a lot of space too: NWN1: 50 mb per save). That would be almost a third of a 100Gb drive. Then account for music and program files and about a quarter of your HD free so you can defragment; a 100 Gb drive gets choked up quite fast.

Philéas wrote: I will probably need one of those in the near future, as the amount of music on my current harddrive is growing rapidly.

Have you ever considered ... deleting some of the files which you never listen to?

Honestly, does anyone really need a terabyte harddrive? Don't think so.

I think it's ridiculous that nowadays people seem to have huge amounts of (useless) data/music on their computer. 10-100 gb should be entirely sufficient to most people, but instead of settling for that, they download huge amounts of music they're never going to listen to. A friend of mine has 250gb of music on his computer, and despite being an avid music listener, he just admitted the other day that he's never listened to at least half of them. Maybe it's just me, but the whole phenomenon seems silly and completely pointless.

This will be mostly useful for servers, backups etc. For home, the damn thing will fail from age by the time you get anywhere near to filling half of it.

It will certainly relieve some of the IT techs from having to constantly do different RAID configurations on the servers.

I will probably need one of those in the near future, as the amount of music on my current harddrive is growing rapidly. 

Tony R wrote: A Terabyte is a 1024 GB.

Yup, although formally that is a tebi-byte (2^40, tera-byte would be 1000^4)


Edited by Angelo - January 06 2007 at 17:54

chamberry wrote: Cygnus X-2 wrote: chamberry wrote: How many Gigabites does one Terrabite has? About a thousand or so. And I thought that was big, when I looked up the definition of the prefix I was even more shocked! Tera = trillion !

Note that the reference to the library of congress in the first post is nice, but have you consider storages of e.g. digital medical images, like XRay and MRI? These things have to be kept on file for periods of 20 years up to patient life time depending on local laws. People working on PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications Systems) for this environment have been looking at peta bytes of storage for the past few years already. They'd be glad to have this type of disc, of course in redundant configurations.
A cardiology example: one Xray examination consists of up to 10 5-10 second runs, at 15-30 frames per second, and each frame is a 1024x1024x16 pixel bitmap at least. Lossy compression is not allowed, and framesizes of 2048x2048x16 or even larger are being used already.

EDIT: One Cardio XRay machine is used on 4-8 patients per day, 5 days a week for 50 weeks per year - now do the math

Here's what wikipedia lists on definitions of size.

10006	1018	exa	E	Quintillion	Trillion	1 000 000 000 000 000 000
10005	1015	peta	P	Quadrillion	Billiard (thousand billion)	1 000 000 000 000 000
10004	1012	tera	T	Trillion	Billion	1 000 000 000 000

Edited by Angelo - January 06 2007 at 17:47

laplace wrote: that's almost big enough to contain all the hawkwind bootlegs in existence.

    
Or Beatles compilations.

Cygnus X-2 wrote: chamberry wrote: How many Gigabites does one Terrabite has? About a thousand or so.

And I thought that was big, when I looked up the definition of the prefix I was even more shocked!

Tera = trillion !