What is a Terabyte?

A Terabyte in Your Future?

Do you need a terabyte? Remember when you got your last computer? A few gigabytes seemed like scads of storage space. But along came a new operating system, a bunch of MP3 music files, and a bunch of videos. Now that hard drive is creaking under the load. Enter the Terabyte...

One terabyte is a trillion bytes (characters) which is also 1000 gigabytes. Or if you prefer, 1 TB = 1000 GB. So how much storage is that, really? Let's do some comparisons... 1 GB of memory is the equivalent of 500,000 typewritten pages, or about one pickup truck of books. So you could say that a terabyte is a thousand librarians driving Ford F150's stacked with literature.

Or in digital terms... the biggest iPod Classic stores 160GB, or about 40,000 songs. Six of those iPods would hold almost one terabyte, enough space to store a quarter-million songs. If you had a shiny new 1-terabtye hard drive, you could stash 300 feature length films, or 40,000 faxes on it. But you'd need 20 of those 1 TB drives to hold the entire print collection of the U.S. Library of Congress.

Large companies, universities, hospitals, the military, and other institutions that store large amounts of data are probably already gobbling up these bigger, badder hard drives. But do you need a terabyte? Maybe... if you're a serious gamer, or if you deal with multimedia files (music or video) then those gigabytes can fill up pretty fast. If you are a videographer making a documentary, if you design websites, or if you want to digitize your audio/video collection in hi-def, one terabyte might not be enough. And having a few terabytes would be a nice way to back up of all the computers on your home network to a single location. An exernal TB drive will also prove useful for those who upgrade to a new computer every few years. Just copy the contents of your PC or Mac's hard drive to it via USB or Ethernet, and you don't have to worry about leaving your data behind.

I suspect it won't be long before some computer vendors will offer these large capacity terabyte drives as standard. Historically, as data storage media has increased in capacity, operating systems, application software and end-user computing needs have expanded at the same (or faster) rates. And price-wise, it makes sense as well. Hard drives in the 100-200 GB range cost about $.50 per gig. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1 Terabyte drive can be found for $329 at TigerDirect, or $.33 per gig.

If you want that kind of storage volume but don't need to be the first on the block to own one, wait six months for the price to come down, as it will continue to do in most tech products. I'm already looking into replacing my Iomega external backup drive with something bigger, and that Beyond Micro DriveZilla 2-Terabyte External drive looks pretty nice... What would you do with a terabyte?