When a terabyte isn't enough
- TAGS:DVD, hard disk, hard drive, movie, MPEG 4, multimedia, Western Digital
- IT TOPICS:Servers, Storage
One and 2 terabyte drives are rapidly becoming the hardware du jour for home use. That seems like plenty. But it may not be nearly enough.
It's hard to get the mind around just how big a trillion bytes of storage space is. A terabyte is one trillion bytes - as in a "one" with twelve zeros after it. As in 1,000 gigabytes (one thousand billion bytes).
A one-page Microsoft Word document takes up about 32 kilobytes (32,000 bytes) of disk space - a microscopic dust spec on the storage platter.
The Library of Congress contains 82.6 terabytes of data. Consumers can store, in their homes on a consumer-grade 1 terabyte hard disk drive, one percent of all of the data stored in the Library of Congress. But consumers don't want the Library of Congress, and they don't want millions of Word documents. They want to store multimedia files, and that ups the ante by an order of magnitude. Or two. Or three.
One terabyte is enough space to hold 17,000 hours of compressed MP3 music, or 1,700 hours of CD-quality music. Not bad.
It's enough space to hold 1,000 hours of MPEG 4 encoded video, or about 500 feature length movies. But not in HD. So, is a terabyte disk large enough to displace the contents of that entire wall of DVDs?
Now that I think about it, a petabyte drive might be nice.
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