Signs that we're living in the future

[inahandbasket]

I think I'm going to start a new series of posts...
Signs that we're living in the future...

we’ve got something special in the shape of a 1.5TB Seagate that should grab your attention. It's the most capacious member of the Barracuda 7200.11 family, sporting an enormous 1.5TB capacity. That’s 1500 metric gigabytes or, to put it another way, this is a hard drive that is so colossal that you appear to lose more than 100GB when the drive is formatted by Windows. The reported capacity is 1,397GB. -ref

For real world perspective, when you actually write data to the drive the space is so capacious that the OVERHEAD of structuring the filesystem metric-binary conversion factor is equivalent to:
- Two library floors of books on shelves
- Or one library floor of academic journals on shelves.

Comments

[drwex]

Dude, you're not old enough to remember when big libraries used to have to clear out shelving to make room for their card catalogs. Same problem.

I can't remember if it was Tim Berners-Lee or Eric Schmidt who predicted that in the very near future the amount of metadata on the Web would outsize the amount of actual data.

Feeling old fogey now...

[inahandbasket]

Feeling old fogey now...
I can help!
My first computer was a 486-DX2 33mhz!

[drwex]

You must have some definition of "helping" with which I'm not familiar.

Sigh. 486. Kids today, I tell ya.

[nacht_musik]

err, actually, no, it's that 1.5 metric terabytes is 1500000000000 bytes (and yes that is how hard disk sizes are measured), and if you divide that by a binary gigabyte (1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824), you get 1396.98386... non-metric gigabytes.

[nacht_musik]

So, that's not saying anything about the Windows filesystem overhead; it's just the difference between the sexy-sounding units used by all disk manufacturers, and the more useful (if less impressive sounding) units Windows uses when reporting capacity.

Sort of like saying "Hey, baby, want to get down with me and my big fat twelve?", when your units are ...centimeters.

[inahandbasket]

I actually do know that, but I was trying not to get into all the particulars of it. Guess I picked a bad word.

I just boggle that the space loss to conversion is as large as my current main HD.

[jjjiii]

Or a shelf of 25 DVDs... not so much when you think about it that way.

[krank-kether.livejournal.com]

Future? Peh. Where's my jet pack?