Terabyte Hard Drive Useful?

100,000 mp3's based on the ad for the original 5GB iPod.

It's so beautiful. If you buy me one I'll tell you how it performs.

Just add a red light in place of the blue and call it Hal 1000GB

carletonmusic said:

Why wouldn't it be 250,000 songs??

40GB
-----
10,000 songs
___________________

1000GB
--------
250,000 songs

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5GB = 1,000 songs
50GB = 10,000 songs
500GB = 100,000 songs
1,000GB = 200,000 songs

Looks like we're both wrong.

Also, I think that the 40GB - 10,000 songs is based on aac encoding. In your first post you specifically said mp3s, so you would have to go with the 5GB -1,000 mp3 reference.

carletonmusic said:

A terabyte of disk storage?? I know that this *is* possible, but it still blows my mind. FW800 & USB2 [At $1199, it's a steal!]

Has anyone bought or seen one of these in use?? I'm wondering what one might use it for besides video editing. And how many MP3s would this hold....

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I remember having this conversation last time we broke the unit of measure reference measure - back with the first Power Mac with a 1GB drive. It'll get used. Trust me.

no all three of you are wrong

1000gb=200,001mp3s

if i had the money i'd buy one right now.

i'd store my DVD library on it (uncompressed). i could fill several of these.

mmmmm.... toasted bytes

Nice, but you'd need two. If I had a terabyte of data, I couldn't stand to loose it if the drive failed

It'd be nice to hook it up to an old machine on a small-to medium size network, and use it as a backup volume. Then, the hard drive could be taken off-site in case of catastrophic failure at the workplace. It'd be easy to have a trusted employee drive it over to a secure location (another branch of the company, a warehouse, a faraway summer house, etc). There's more reliability in diversity. Also, this drive would be great for those who would want to archive video projects, which can easily be several gigs each.

Alternately, if someone really loves to store everything they find on the internet, this drive would suit them well.

i think it's a bit too much data in one physical place... i'd feel much safer to have two half TB drives or even four quarter TB drives...

this drive is not cheaper or smaller than either of those options...

that is, of course, assuming you don't work with files that are half TB in size...

jxyama said:

i think it's a bit too much data in one physical place... i'd feel much safer to have two half TB drives or even four quarter TB drives...

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I'm with u there. I'm preparing to get a set of 250's...one for backup & the other to double backup.

the advertisement in macmall magazine says that "it allows users to store nearly two years of continuous music and up to one month of non-stop MPEG-2 video." that's just insane.

actually, now that i think about it, it depends on the definition of "useful."

is it useful for me? no.

is it useful in a sense of driving the technology and market so that my next laptop will have 512 GB hd? absolutely.

"it allows users to store nearly two years of continuous music..."

Click to expand...

naturally, we'll eventually progress to...

this will allow the user to store enough music so that he can listen for his entire life, 24/7, 365 days a year, and never come across the same song twice!

Click to expand...

carletonmusic said:

I'm wondering what one might use it for besides video editing.

Click to expand...

Some Photoshop artists routinely build projects 100MB or more in size. That would be just 2000 photoshop files. If you could produce one of these works per day, it would take just under five and a half years to fill your Terabyte drive.

wordmunger said:

Some Photoshop artists routinely build projects 100MB or more in size. That would be just 2000 photoshop files. If you could produce one of these works per day, it would take just under five and a half years to fill your Terabyte drive.

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true, but if it takes 5+ years, wouldn't you opt for 5 separate disks, perhaps? afterall, capacity increases and prices drop all the time, why make an investment now for 5 years ahead?

regardless, there's no "correct" way to use it... whoever sees the benefit for the price would get one, i guess.

it does have a bit of "awesome"-ness to it, though. "ha ha, you 200 GB disk is no match for my TB." that just sounds cool.

wordmunger said:

Some Photoshop artists routinely build projects 100MB or more in size. That would be just 2000 photoshop files. If you could produce one of these works per day, it would take just under five and a half years to fill your Terabyte drive.

Click to expand...

At work we've just finished working on a 2.5 Gig photoshop file, It got so big the PC with it's huge hard disk, duel 3gig processors etc etc couldn't open it any more.

BUT I though I would try it on my humble Mac at home (just incase) and guess what....... it opened.

My machine is a 533 G4 with 640meg of RAM

So the Mac saved the day!

your gig per mp3 debate makes me wonder how many terabytes the itms is... say it gets up to 1,000,000 songs, which i bet it will in less than a year... thats like 10 terabytes...give or take.

how many xserves would that be?

A friend of mine owns a graphic arts business and she had about 500GB's worth of data in just over 6 months. She had to order a 500GB to back it up. She wanted to get one but she needed it right away.

TBR said:

At work we've just finished working on a 2.5 Gig photoshop file, It got so big the PC with it's huge hard disk, duel 3gig processors etc etc couldn't open it any more.

BUT I though I would try it on my humble Mac at home (just incase) and guess what....... it opened.

My machine is a 533 G4 with 640meg of RAM

So the Mac saved the day!

Click to expand...

what're you doing with 2.5 GB photoshop file???

reality

i dunno. one could not have to ever buy a new hd if you get one of these.
it'll be interesting to see these inside consumer machines years from now, and we'll all look back on this thread and say, "imagine what it would have been like not to have them"

bennetsaysargh said:

i dunno. one could not have to ever buy a new hd if you get one of these.
it'll be interesting to see these inside consumer machines years from now, and we'll all look back on this thread and say, "imagine what it would have been like not to have them"

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Never say never. I can still remember my first hard drive--20 Megs (yes, I'm that old). I never thought I'd be able to fill that, and now 40 Gigs seems pretty tight--2000 times larger!

wordmunger said:

Never say never. I can still remember my first hard drive--20 Megs (yes, I'm that old). I never thought I'd be able to fill that, and now 40 Gigs seems pretty tight--2000 times larger!

Click to expand...

yeah, no kidding. my PB has more RAM than combined HD capacity in two computers i used in college... and that was less than 10 years ago!