If I’d asked anyone what a thousand gigabytes is called 10 years ago, they’d look at my like I was crazy.  No one could even fathom that much storage. 

A few months ago, Seagate announced the worlds largest desktop hard drive, 1.5 TB.  That TB means terabytes, otherwise known as 1,500 gigabytes, 1,500,000 megabytes, 1,500,000,000 kilobytes, you get the idea.  To put this in perspective do you remember those 5.25" black floppy drives?  It would take 2,343,750 of those disks to equal the size of this new harddrive.  Assuming they are 1/8" thick that would make a stack 292,968 Inches tall (That is 4.62 miles or 24,414 feet).  All this storage has been compressed into a rectangle that is only 1" thick.

That’s a lot of storage.  But is it really?  Do we need that much space on a desktop computer?  Why not?  Storage is cheap compared to what it was just a few years ago.  My first PC had a 10 megabyte hard drive.  That means I could store 10,000,000 characters of text.  Ten million wow!  Sure sounds like a lot until you compare it to todays world-that would barely hold 2 music downloads. 

I was lucky though, most PC’s in the late 80’s didn’t have hard drives at all, just a 5.25” floppy drive.  You’d put in the operating system floppy to boot up, then insert your program floppy to load the program you wanted to run, then insert a data floppy if you wanted to save what you were working on.  All this fit into 640 kilobytes of memory.  Pretty impressive in its day. 

In 1980, a 10 mb hard drive (just the drive, not the computer needed to run it) went for $3400.  Fortunately I got mine used from the university for $50 several years after.  We live in a digital age.  Almost anything can be stored in 1’s or 0’s; music, photos, videos, documents, you name it.  And it all takes up space.  And if its important 1’s and 0’s, like babies first steps on home video, it needs to be backed up, requiring more storage. 

I’m a fan of using a PC as a media hub in the home.  I will store all the kids DVD’s on my PC’s hard drive so we don’t have to worry about scratching or loosing disks.  These movies, uncompressed can take up to 8GB of space each.  With the introduction of Blu-Ray movies, these can take 50GB of space.  While these movies could be compressed, you loose quality in picture and sound.  I prefer to leave them in their native format, I don’t want to loose a single Pixar pixel.  My music is all stored on my hard drive and can be streamed to any room in the house.  Photos going back 10 years since my first digital camera are stored on my hard drive and can be easily brought up on the big screen for slide show night.  We never pull out photo albums anymore, and if it isn’t digitized, it gets lost.  So who needs all that space?  I’m certainly glad to have it.  Who knows, in a few years I may be boasting the benefits of my petabyte drive, amazed I used to fit it all in a few terabytes.

Terabytes in use
•    Wal-Mart's data warehouse in Middletown, Connecticut contains 500 terabytes of data as of 2004.
•    The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that "as of May 2008, the Library has collected more than 82.6 terabytes of data"
•    Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 terabytes of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.
•    LaCie released the world's first 1 TB external hard drive in early 2004.
•    Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte internal hard drive in 2007.
•    In 1993 total internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year.  As of June 2008, Cisco Systems estimated internet traffic at 160 terabytes per second.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
 

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As computers progress and get cheaper, it is often easier and cheaper to replace a computer than it is to fix it. Some of our clients aren’t used to this approach. Many have been using computers since they cost $5,000 and are accustomed to maximizing the investment by getting as much use as possible out of the computer. Here are some of the reasons I give when I tell clients their money would be better spent replacing a problematic PC older than 3 years:

• Productivity. Almost everyone who gets a new computer talks about how much faster it is compared to the old one. For business owners, that means your employees can be more productive, and hopefully make you more money.
• Data protection. While it is always good to test your backup strategy, doing so by experiencing a failed hard drive is not what I would recommend. A 3+year old hard drive is in some cases a ticking time bomb. It is much easier to replace a computer before the hard drive dies.
• New programs and features. Often times, companies contact us when they have a new program they want to install that won’t run on the computers they are currently using. This means that if they want to run the new program, all computers need to be upgraded or usually replaced.
• Warranties. As a machine gets older, it is often more difficult to find replacement parts for some components. By being covered by a manufacturer’s warranty, we can typically receive all necessary parts next business day, free of charge.
• Budgets. When you drive a computer until the wheels fall off, it is difficult to predict what the expenses will be. Computers often die a slow death, requiring on-site visits to replace failed components and employee downtime. If a company decides to replace all computers every three or four years, it is easy to plan in advance, before yearly budgets are created, which machines will need to be replaced during that year.

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