TB Hard Drive

Just not too long ago IT enthusiasts were excited and talking about the 1TB hard drive.  It seems to be more than enough for our everyday digital storage usage, particularly at home for ripped DVD movies, digital photo and music storage.  Not only most of us can’t fill it up after we stored all of our digital files (except those hardcore users or torrent freak), we can even do a full PC backup on top of that.

Then, manufacturer announced and released the 1.5TB hard drive, and 1TB unit price dropped to a more wallet-friendly RM338, to be exact (available in Karamunsing, I myself just bough a couple of that weeks ago). 

Now, just recently, 2TB hard drive news pop up in all PC magazines.  Although priced at RM12xx at the moment, it will go down soon or later.   For those who don’t know, it’s around 2000GB (for easy calculation), or 2000000MB!  If an average mp3 file sized at 4MB, how many songs can we fit in a 2TB drive?  How about an average 700MB AVI files we ripped from a DVD movie?  How many of those files can we fit into this hard drive?  You do the maths.  My sister, an average PC user, got a shocked when I told her how far a hard drive capacity has gone to now.  She backup all her downloaded TV series on DVD-R then packed them nicely in shoes boxes (what a way..!).  So, I suggested her to get a 1TB or 1.5TB hard drive to store all her downloads then share them across the home network. 

For more advanced PC users, hobbyists, modders, or whatever name you like to call them, storage capacity can never be enough.  Especially when we are talking about ripping our media to the highest possible quality.  A MPEG2 DVD rip can go as large as 5GB, and 10 times or more for a BD movie.  So, with a 2TB drive to store DVD rips at average 5GB per file, that’s about 400 movies.  You say that’s a lot of movies?  Not to a movie freak.

I’ll build a media server once my house is ready, to serve the living rooms and home theater room.  Server storage capacity?  Well, currently targeting at a 10-bay PC case…and hard drive manufacturers are planning to roll out 3TB drive soon.

Welcome to the Terabyte Era!