The arrival of the terabyte

[Prometheus1992]

We all know about the terabyte...so does anyone know when the first PC will be released having a terabyte worth of memory?

 

[Dr. Yoshi]

There are already gaming machines with RAID configurations that allow for up to 1 TB of disk space. Dell even has one. As for 1 TB of RAM, I'd say 2 years.

 

[Speedo]

1TB of storage isn't such a big thing... I know one guy who has about 3TB of space on his home network and is using over 2TB of it. Since 500GB drives are easy to come by now and have a pretty reasonable price per GB, it's not that hard to get 1TB.

Even with my current motherboard I could easily easily fit 5.6TB of space (though it would be in a 2TB and 3.6TB array, using JBOD) internally. On top of that I could add a maximum of 10 USB drives, and since I believe you can get SATA USB enclosures that adds and addition 5TB... though honestly I would just go with NAS before messing with so many USB drives.

For actual memory though, you won't 1TB for a good while. The *average* PC doesn't even need 1GB, and 2GB is overkill even for hardcore gamers. The main people who would even dream of needing more than that would be those doing heavy Photoshop or 3D work. Besides, most mobos you'll find today support 4GB max... or 1/250 TB

 

[classical_hero]

Some people could do with that much space, especially if you download a lot of songs of the net.

 

[Tank_Guy#3]

I think that amount of space is sufficient

 

[Speedo]

Some people could do with that much space, especially if you download a lot of songs of the net.

You would have to be... hardcore, to say the least. At an average of 5MB per mp3, 1TB would give room for 200,000 mp3s.

 

[vbraun]

I think that amount of space is sufficient

I'm not even filling up my 80gb partiton in Windows..

 

[Thrawn]

You would have to be... hardcore, to say the least. At an average of 5MB per mp3, 1TB would give room for 200,000 mp3s.

If you count movies, anime, tv shows, games, music, and anything else you care to download and store, it'd be really easy to fill up 1TB.

 

[Speedo]

If you count movies, anime, tv shows, games, music, and anything else you care to download and store, it'd be really easy to fill up 1TB.

Sure... if you spend all of your time downloading everything you can find and never clean anything out. Heck, it would take almost 40 days of nonstop downloading at a constant 300KB/s to fill 1TB.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

You would have to be... hardcore, to say the least. At an average of 5MB per mp3, 1TB would give room for 200,000 mp3s.

If you count that an mp3 is on average 1 mb/min you would have enough music to fill 2 years of continous, non-repetitious stream

 

[lost_civantares]

I think that amount of space is sufficient

What was Bill Gates' famous quote again? I'm sure people will find a way soon enough to use that amount of memory, if not just getting it for boasting rights (for those who have the money to spend, which is most definitly not me).

 

[Alvaro da Luna]

What was Bill Gates' famous quote again? I'm sure people will find a way soon enough to use that amount of memory, if not just getting it for boasting rights (for those who have the money to spend, which is most definitly not me).

The quote by Bill Gates:

64K ought to be enough for anyone.

 

[wit>trope]

Bill Gates obviously meant it would be enough given the range of programs that were in use in that day and age. He didn't mean it would always and forever be enough. But it's still a little funny.

You could copy all your DVDs on to a TB drive and run out of room. One DVD movie would be like 5-20 GBs ... so let's go with 10 GB. Then after about 100 movies you wound run out of room.

BTW, the practice of hard drive marketing to make 1GB equal less than 1GB is stupid and dishonest. Apparently there have even been lawsuits about it.

I mean imagine if you wanted to do a backup of something and using Windows you found out it was going to be 78GB total space you needed. And let's say you go out and buy a "80 GB" external hard drive just to do this backup or archive or whatever. Then you find out "80GB" is actually less than 78GB. You are screwed. And you should sue. Class action lawsuit is what is needed to change the practices of these greedy companies.

"Enron" scandal and legal repercussions including indictments changed dishonest accounting methods.

A new scandal or class action lawsuit is needed to change dishones marketing methods (not just for hard drive companies but for across all industries across the board)

 

[Speedo]

You could copy all your DVDs on to a TB drive and run out of room. One DVD movie would be like 5-20 GBs ... so let's go with 10 GB. Then after about 100 movies you wound run out of room.

But why the heck would you want to, mustless need to? If you're just look for ways to burn up space then sure, I could probably use up a couple dozen TB.

BTW, the practice of hard drive marketing to make 1GB equal less than 1GB is stupid and dishonest. Apparently there have even been lawsuits about it.

I mean imagine if you wanted to do a backup of something and using Windows you found out it was going to be 78GB total space you needed. And let's say you go out and buy a "80 GB" external hard drive just to do this backup or archive or whatever. Then you find out "80GB" is actually less than 78GB. You are screwed. And you should sue. Class action lawsuit is what is needed to change the practices of these greedy companies.

*shrug* The main thing to blame for them getting away with it is consumer ignorance and apathy. I would expect the average person to think that 1KB = 1000 bytes, and so on up the chain. Those of us who do know are just used to the fact that the drive is smaller than what the label says and don't worry about it. Heck, most people probably think they're getting a good deal when they see that their 80GB drive is actually larger than 80,000,000,000 bytes.

It's interesting though that only the storage guys seem to do this (my 512MB flash drive is also 19,366,912 bytes smaller than it should be). You don't really see it with memory though, for example.

"Enron" scandal and legal repercussions including indictments changed dishonest accounting methods.

People tend to get more worked up over $$$ than a few missing GB.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

I could easily fill 1 terabyte with my anime downloads even if I only included unlicensed titles that aren't released in the US. My last addition was a 300gb hard drive and it took me 3 months to fill it and thats only because I realized that the money I was spending on dvds could just go to a new hard drive. Its a lot of space for average users but with the new hd/blue ray discs coming out file sizes are just going to grow. Then there is Windows Media Center so a lot of people will want to rip dvds to hard drives instead of scratching up their dvds. There is actually a dvd recorder released in Japan that has 1 terabyte of storage space.

 

[marshal zhukov]

If you count that an mp3 is on average 1 mb/min you would have enough music to fill 2 years of continous, non-repetitious stream

That would be so cool, 2 years of music. I'll get there

 

[Ultima Dragoon]

Imagine how fast morrowind would be if the computer running it had 1 TB of ram....

 

[warmwaffles]

That would be like INSANE...too bad most CPUs dont support that much memory let alone the mobos too..

2TB's of ****....OMFG....I would have to shoot myself if I used that much memory up....good god...I am running off of a 38GB HD and its serving me well....but soon I am gonna go buy a 500GB HD and maybe RAID a couple together

 

[Maniacal]

One computer to unite them all (put all your stuff on one comp),
One computer to rule them all (you can play it perfectely on it)

If only I had the mnoey to blow.

 

[Speedo]

The amount of RAM you have will really only affect performance if you don't have enough of it. If your game only needs 739MB RAM (and you have enough space after that to cover all other open processes) then you'll get the same performance in that game whether you have 1GB RAM or 1TB.

The main factor with RAM, once you have enough of it, is the latency & timing.