I saw an external runtime that is 1.5 tetrabytes. But I have no clue how big that is.

I found this on the internet:

1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte

1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte

1,048,576 (1,0242) megabytes = 1 terabyte

But I can't get my brain around those numbers.

I currently have a 250 gig external drive and it's full! I was going to get another one that is 500 gigs, but I looked at my partitioned drive and a couple of my smaller 40 gig external drives and I don't think it would all fit onto 500 gigs. So I want something bigger, and a tetrabyte seems bigger.

How many 250 gigs are in 1.5 tetrabytes.  Knowing that will help me to visualize the size.

6

Six 250 gig drives would be 1.5 terabytes, since .5 is one half of a terabyte, which would be another 500 gigs tacked on to the 1000 gigs. Or not...

It's this simple, Acadia.

1 Megabyte = 1 million bytes
1 Gigabyte = 1 Billion bytes
1 Terrabyte = 1 Trillion bytes

Currently I have nearly 2 terrabytes in hard drive space when you factor in all of my hard drives.

Round’em off and

Kilobyte = 1000

Megabyte = 1,000,000

Gigabyte = 1,000,000,000

Terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000

So a 1.5 Terabyte drive would hold about the same as 6  drives that were 250 Gigs.

Remember that disk manufactuerers use another definition for megabyte, gigabyte and terabyte than the official ones. For example a 750 gigabyte harddisk actually has 750,000,000,000 bytes, which equals 698 "real" gigabytes.
So when you format that 1.5 Tb drive, expect to get somewhat less than 1400 "real" gigabytes.

Whee! Thanks!

I'll get that 1.5 tetrabyte one. That should last me until at least the end of the year!  

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix

That is a list of the prefixes and their numerical equivalent.

Acadia, just wanted to let you know two things.

1) You have several times written "tetrabytes". A tetra is a type of small fish, often kept in home aquariums. Terabyte - only has 2 t's, not 3. When you first asked, I honestly thought it was perhaps a new technical term, not a mispelling of terabyte. (Tetra in Greek means 4, so thought it was a 4-byte something perhaps.)

2) A terabyte used to be a huge enterprise-grade amount of storage. EMC corporation became a giant corporate presence selling terabyte storage systems, comprising hundreds or thousands of individual hard drives slaved to work together as one. Only 10 years ago, I remember getting one at work that was $50,000 US. The idea that you're going to put 1.5 TB in your PC, for the purpose of making pretty pictures, is astonishing to me. :-)

Today, EMC won't talk to you unless you're interested in petabytes. That's 1000 times a terabyte.

Interestingly, the word petabyte has nothing to do with the French word "pete" (accents?). Unless the inventor of the word tried to convey the idea of farting enormous amounts of bytes

True, not too long ago, one terabyte was expensive, enterprise storage. That triggers memories....

I live in Hannover, Germany. We have one of the biggest computer fairs worldwide in Hannover - the CeBit. The CeBit started 1986 as a fair of it's own, it was part of the Hannover Industry Fair in the earlier years. 

In the first CeBit, I remember seeing a "True Color Graphics Subsystem". If I remember right, it was available in a resolution of 320200 or in 640400, both could be connected via the serial interface (RS-232, still in many computers. If you still use a modem, it may be connected over that port). It took some time to transfer an image to the system, it was expensive - close to one million dollar at that time, if I remember right. I was really impressed, and thought - that would be great, if stuff like this would be cheap enough for normal people - but I did not expect that to happen.

Today, much better graphics adapters a thrown away, just because they are to slow and too bad. Every adapter is better than this. 

"tetra" is also related to the greek name for the number 4 (for example, in the word Tetrahedron)

And not to forget the Tetra Pak ... though a bit similar to a harddrive :rolleyes: ... sometimes the milk (read as  data) will flow into the glass (read as application) and sometimes not.
In second case you will need a cleaning cloth (read as system admin or developer) ... :laugh:

yeah...after Terabyte would be petabyte, then exobyte, (I think)...you're talking Star-Trek-sized storage by then...;) Decca - is a number found on a record label...;)

and to think...in 1988 I had 2 30-megabyte drives in my system, and wondered how I'd ever fill them...;)

I once bought a 20Mb harddrive and thought it would last me forever..... it didn't, so I upgraded to 40Mb. Figured it would last a while, but soon I had 60Mb.... 80Mb....120Mb....250Mb. Then came the Gb's..... 6Gb....20Gb....40Gb (that one is still in my computer!!)... 120Gb (it died)....160Gb (still in my computer) and last a 500Gb external drive. None of them lasted forever, only a year or less.

And you know what? I still believe my 500Gb external drive will last me forever. But the larger the drive capacities, the larger software developer do make their software. In the end you win nothing at all by buying a larger hard drive, the software grows with them.

I currently have 1.5 terabytes online spread across the 3 machines.... but that's not counting the laptop and all the Dvd's I've burnt.....

Hmm. Total amount of disk space on all my machines together is rather - insane, one might say.

Main server: 2x160 GB in RAID 1
Auxiliary server: 2x74GB + 2 x 750 GB (two RAID 1 arrays)
Workstation 1: 2x500 GB
Workstation 2: 1x 320 GB + 1 x 750 GB + 1x 1000GB
Workstation 3: 1x74 GB + 1x320 GB + 1 x 1000 GB
Workstation 4: 2x80 GB+1x160 GB
Mediacenter: 1x300 GB
Laptop: 1x 160 GB
External: 1000 GB
Total: over 8000 GB (8 TB).

I remember paying $180 for a 120 MB drive in 1991.  Last year I bought a 1TB for $130, and now I could buy  a 1.5 TB for that.

I still have an 8" floppy with MS FORTRAN 80 on it.

Cheers,

Rod

Quote - Acadia, just wanted to let you know two things.

1) You have several times written "tetrabytes". A tetra is a type of small fish, often kept in home aquariums. Terabyte - only has 2 t's, not 3. When you first asked, I honestly thought it was perhaps a new technical term, not a mispelling of terabyte. (Tetra in Greek means 4, so thought it was a 4-byte something perhaps.)

2) A terabyte used to be a huge enterprise-grade amount of storage. EMC corporation became a giant corporate presence selling terabyte storage systems, comprising hundreds or thousands of individual hard drives slaved to work together as one. Only 10 years ago, I remember getting one at work that was $50,000 US. The idea that you're going to put 1.5 TB in your PC, for the purpose of making pretty pictures, is astonishing to me. :-)

Today, EMC won't talk to you unless you're interested in petabytes. That's 1000 times a terabyte.

Petabyte? Isn't that where an animal activist gets bitten by the animal they are trying to feed carnivores vegetables?

my first hard drive was connected to Atari St and it had 85 megs........so now with a terabyte it is terrifix

Quote - Petabyte? Isn't that where an animal activist gets bitten by the animal they are trying to feed carnivores vegetables?

  Good one! 

Speaking of sizes, last night I watched a movie in which a guy was told, "I want your entire C drive backed up on a floppy disk!" That movie was released in 2000.

Oh, and I remember thinking a computer I owned was hot stuff because it had a 20 gig hard drive. :P

I'm working with a company that has to move vast quantities of digital movies over the network, from a central location to remote digital signs. This requires the services of what is called a CDN (Content Distribution Network.)

We have to move about 2 GB of new content to 500 remote devices every month. That comes out to exactly 1000 GB or 1 TB.  So I happen to know what the cost of 1 TB network data is at the moment.

It costs $1000 US to move that much data in a month. Interesting, eh? At this point, based on current CDN costs, it would be cheaper to buy a new 1 TB disk and copy your data and physically mail it, than to transmit 1 TB over the net.

copy the entire C drive to floppy...I had to do that (used more than 1...;) using the MS-DOS backup command (about 89 or so...;) Took about 25 floppies to back up a 10 megabyte Hardcard (hard drive on a desktop expansion card...;). Oh, and it was in prison, too...;) (not me, the PC...;)

As to the original question I thought bagginsbill was almost spot on.  There is a fish food called Tetramin for small tropical fish and I figured Tetrabyte might be for big ones!   :)      You can copy hard drives one to another by cabling direct.

When you back up that 1.5 terabyte drive to DVD you will need around three hundred or more disks.

I remember the HUGE 30mb harddisk I had in my Amstrad.
If someone had told me I'd think nothing of emailing a 30mb file to someone... I'd have told them they are nuts. I had a 9.6 baud modem and it was EXPENSIVE to be online, so when you were done, you turned it off immediately. Email came along. Oh my!

I remember watching "Hackers" and one of them exclaiming “it’s got a 28.8bps modem!!!“

How times have changed... :)

Well, my first computer was an Amiga 500, 1 meg RAM, iirc. No hard drive, hard drives were WAY to expesnive, £300 for 120 megs, iirc?

Now, 8 gig RAM, 64 bit, quad core, 2x500gig drives...!! phenomenal change in oh..18 years?
I see they now sell an add on, for Amiga 600s and 1200s, you can plug a USB flash drive into the Amiga, to use as a hard drive.
So, yer old amiga can have an 8 gig flash drive....if only we had that back in the day, GAH!!! ;)

I'd imagine in 10 years, well have 64 Core CPUs, 1 terabyte of RAM, twin holographic drives of...flipping insane sizes lol, 100 petabytes each? the systems will also be more powerful by integration and 3 dimensional linkage across the CPUs and externals, and let us do real time rendering.

In a few years, that's how much RAM we'll need.

See what I know. I always thought a terabyte was a term used to describe when a flying dinosaur named tera something or another took a chunk out of a cave mans butt!

Acadia, you are rigiht about how fast you fill it up. There is a set of Murphy's laws relative to business. One was that you will always fill up the space available. Meaning that if a company built extra offices for future expansion, they hired bodies they didn't need to fill up the space sooner rather then later and long before they actaully needed the people. Got a 1T drive last spring and fit Murphy's law as I got real careless on what I kept and what I didn't. It's easy to do when you have all that room.

There's a law around somewhere which states something along the lines of
"Nature abhors a vacuum and empty disk space"

I don't think Tetras bite :lol:

Sorry could not resist a little pun

I remember saying a few years ago, never would need more than 32MB ram and 8gig harddrive.

Quote - There is a set of Murphy's laws relative to business. One was that you will always fill up the space available. Meaning that if a company built extra offices for future expansion, they hired bodies they didn't need to fill up the space sooner rather then later and long before they actaully needed the people. Got a 1T drive last spring and fit Murphy's law as I got real careless on what I kept and what I didn't. It's easy to do when you have all that room.

It's the general form of Parkinson's Law.   The law was originally "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"  but several corollaries have been added on to it, including "Data expands to fill the space available for storage."  The Law has been generalized to: "The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource."

Using the office example, it happens twice: first the number of people expand to fill the space, then the work fills to match the number of people.

My first computer was an Atari 800 and it had 16K of RAM and used a cassette tape recorder
as a mass storage device.  Don't remember anymore how many bytes a tape would hold.
I guess a few K.

Quote - When you back up that 1.5 terabyte drive to DVD you will need around three hundred or more disks.

Wow! I can't believe this thread is still active. I only asked what I thought was a simple question, hehe

I plan on buying 2 of the external hard drives and mirroring them. That way if one fails, I'll still have the data on the other. If both fail, well, whoopsie!  

Two! Wow. You're killing me.

Hehehe. Wow. 2 TB.

I just looked up the data transfer specs on these things. Seems the common speed is 480 Mbps. At that rate, if you were loading data on it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no pause, it will take you 695 days to fill it.

Well, with my Mac Pro, I can go up to 7.5 Terabytes ( $130 per 1.5 Terabyte drive) but if I wait a month or two the 2TB drives will start popping up.

Hi Bagginsbill,

how did you calculate that ??? That look like stone age ...

1 Mbps = 1 Megabit per second = 1.000.000 bit per second
with 8 bit = 1 byte, we have 125.000 byte per second or ~ 125 KB/s
so we have 480 * 125 KB/s = 60.000 KB/s = ~ 60 MB/s
This makes 3.600 MB/m or 216.000 MB/h = ~ 216 GB/h

Letting out that I have use 1000 instead of 1024 as correct divisor and also letting out some trafffic overhead for handshaking on the line, I think 1 Terabyte drivespace is filled in less than 5 hours .... though long enough but far away from 695 days ...

Think of a older "normal" DSL internet connection having 2000 kbit/s and think how quick you transfer a 2, 5 or 10 MB zipfile ... right, less than 1 minute ...

Ah - I typed something wrong into the calculator. I didn't check my work. You're right. About 5 hours.

I suppose then, that the legendary Giant-Killer-Mutant-Neon Tetras are completely OT?

(bagginsbill made me do it!   - with apologies to Toucan, Anthony, FastTraxx, Virus, and artists in general.)

LOL

Nance you are giving Gordon and his bi-weekly toons a run for his money. Good one

I admire everyone else's self-restraint, ...but,  but,  this just kept coming back around!