You don’t really need to be a certified geek to appreciation the implications of a three terabyte hard drive priced under $300. That’s about a 50% increase over the previous maximum capacity, and enough storage to hold over 400,000 songs. Or you could store a hundred Blu-Ray movies (at 30 gigabytes each).
Unfortunately, many computers won’t be able to take advantage of this extra storage without installing extra hardware or software, due to a 30-year old decision about hard drive standards. Fortunately, Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6 users don’t have this limitation, so Seagate’s drive will work for them right out of the box. Their biggest problem is going to be finding one of these massive drives; Seagate’s website shows them to be out of stock, already.
OK, perhaps that’s not the biggest problem. I suspect figuring out how to back-up one of these drives will be the real challenge. It would require 600 regular DVDs to make a copy of a full 3 terabyte hard drive.
[I had to use an Excel spreadsheet to make the preceding computations, because I can’t wrap my mind around numbers this big.]
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