Byte Me
Mar 19, 12:00 pm

I built a PC from scratch! Well actually, my Ben built it and I watched… ok, I played video games while he put together the PC puzzle and I looked over every once in a while… usually to tell him to turn his music down (too much Primus makes Caly go crazy).  But even though I didn’t build it, I get to take advantage of its awesome power.  It has an amazing 1 Terabyte, 7200 RPM Seagate internal SATA drive.  1 Terabyte!! To really understand the size of this drive I think it’s important to first look at the data size increments.  Ready?! Here we go!

  • Bit – First, we have the bit.  This is the smallest measurement term for data storage capacity. So when you say, “I want a little bit of that,” remember how little a bit really is. 8 Bits = 1 Byte
  • Byte – This is still pretty tiny. Think of a cell in your body… and while you’re doing that I’m going to continue going through the size increments for computer data. 1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
  • Kilobyte – This sentence is a kilobyte (give or take). 1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
  • Megabyte – Take a low-quality photo and email it to me; it’ll be about a Megabyte. 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
  • Gigabyte – Here’s something interesting, in the early 90’s Seagate began to sell the first 1GB hard drives for a few million US dollars. Wowza. 1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
  • Terabyte - YouTube.com offices hold over 6 terabytes full of user-submitted videos. 1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
  • Petabyte - What?  There’s something past the Terabyte?  Yes, my friend. Yes, there is. A Petabyte is equal to one quadrillion bytes! As of November 2006, eBay had 2 petabytes of data. 1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
  • Exabyte – Unimaginably HUGE! Consider buying a one Exabyte hard drive if you feel the need to store 50,000 years of DVD-quality video.  1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
  • Zettabyte - By 2010, there will be about 1 Zettabyte of electronic data in existence. 1024 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte
  • Yottabyte – We’re talking galaxy huge here. Let’s bring it back to the beginning - 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 Bytes = 1 Yottabyte.  It’d be a good trick to give a kid a Yottabyte hard drive and tell him you’ll buy him a new car if he could max out its storage capacity. Though, he could probably just take that drive and sell it to buy a small country; say Luxemburg.
Blows your mind, doesn’t it?  So with that Terabyte of storage, I could save 243,855 copies of Free Bird on my new PC. Better yet, I have the capacity to fit almost 75% of all the lol cats pictures that are out on the internet on my hard drive in super duper high res.  This is great.  I’m looking forward to building (read: having Ben build) a new PC in a few years with an Exabyte of storage.  I can really see how storing 50,000 years of DVD-quality video could come in handy.

Now that I have a Terabyte hard drive, I think it’s time to start a Terabyte Club. Who wants in?