When 200 Gigabytes Isn't Enough...
From Forbes.com:
NEW YORK - Every few years it seems that hard drives go through a bit of a revolution. Certainly they're always getting bigger--and there's never any letup in the need for data storage.
We couldn't help but be a bit impressed by a drive we ran across recently called the Googie Orbit, from Denmark's Googie Drives. While internal PC hard drives that have a capacity of 160 gigabytes or even 200 gigabytes may seem pretty spacious--and to the average user they are--this line of external hard drives gets into the realm of terabytes.
Googie's Orbit drive
The drives connect to a PC via the Firewire port and come in capacities ranging from 720 gigabytes to 2,000 gigabytes, or about two terabytes. The company says the drives boast a transfer speed of 50 megabits per second and a 9-millisecond access time.
That's more storage than most mere mortals will ever need. Indeed, the drive is being aimed at professionals who need it for things like video editing and whatnot. But there's nothing complicated about installing them. All you need is a Firewire port on your computer. That port is standard on all new Macintosh systems from Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) and is available on PCs running Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Windows as well. Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ) calls its Firewire port i.Link for reasons that make sense only to its executives, while others still insist on calling it 1394, after the technical specification that defines it. If your machine doesn't have this port, then Googie includes a PCI-based FireWire card, compatible with Macs or PCs. The drive supports Macs running Mac OS 8.6 and higher, including Mac OS X, and PCs running Windows 98 Special Edition, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Of course this kind of storage doesn't come cheap. The 720-GB drive is priced at $3,950 while the 2,000-GB version goes for $9,420. They're available directly from the company at googiestore.com.
As we said, 2,000 gigabytes makes for 2 terabytes. In case you were wondering, a thousand terabytes makes a petabyte. A thousand of those makes an exabyte. Beyond that comes zettabytes and then yottabytes. That's one septillion bytes of data. But, then again, who's counting?
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Just think, in a few years we'll all have terabyte drives!
Imagine the bloated OSs and Apps that will be made for it!
Let us know when you pop for one...