A Story of Storage

I bought a new 400GB Hard Disk today - for less than a $100.

This got me thinking. I still remember my first year in the university, when everything was still measured in megabytes (1024KB). In a course called File Structures, my professor, Ariel Frank, said: "Pretty soon, we'll be talking about giga-bytes. That's 1024MB people! And just so you won't be ignorant - the next unit up is tera-byte - that's 1024G. But this number will probably only be used by governments and large movie studios" (he was into multimedia well before the rest of the world).

Looking around my house, I have, for my laptop:

1. 2 100GB internal disks
   
2. 2 external USB 100GB disks
3. 1 external USB 400GB disk

For my Mac:

1. 80GB internal disk
   
2. 250GB Firewire external disk
   

Altogether, not counting the numerous Flash disks thrown around, my iPod and the 20GB on the Xbox 360, I have well over a terabyte at home. And last I've checked, I'm not a government and my only interest in movies is watching them.

So, Moore's Law has been broken several times and the price point has dropped enough for us to not ever need to delete files. This, of course is heaven to makers of search software (X1, Copernic, etc.). If people don't throw away their garbage, they definitely would need help to sift through it...

Oh, and just so you won't be ignorant, the next unit up is peta-byte - that's 1024TB...