Terrabytes: the next big thing

Welcome to a new mainstream economic cross roads. This is one where your state of the art PC could hold upwards of eight terabytes of movies, music, games and pictures.

Tera-what? Exactly. The truly geeky side of technology only interferes with the general public on rare occasions. However, it seems the gap is being closed at a faster pace than ever.

Take this column for example. There are two types of readers: those who know a lot more than myself and those who know a bit less. However, I am taking an active role in bridging the gap by informing the public about these ‘tech-y’ issues.

A terabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes of hard drive space. To put that into context, please view the iPod graphic next to this story. With that cleared up, the question needs to be asked: Why would anyone need that much space?

Some computer developers purport that with the advent of high-definition video, we would need enormous hard drives to keep our media at bay. This is proved more logical when we realize that computers are slowly becoming our entire media centers. This being the case, it would make sense to have this much space.

Imagine putting all of your movies on a hard drive and buying them directly from the Internet, much like we do with music today. People would need that space, especially with high-quality resolution video.

Bear in mind, though, that we are not there yet. Actually, we probably won’t be there for a few more years. This stunt of pushing gobs of memory on the general public is child’s play for anyone who understands how computers store information. Don’t let them get you.