Tuesday, September 11, 2012

SOTC 11/365

SOTC 11/365 by gina.blank Yup. I'm pretty much a walking advertisement for HP today.* I've been meaning to purchase an external hard drive for a while, now, and finally just bit the bullet today and bought one. On sale, and available at an Air Miles sponsor store--win, and win!

This external hard drive will soon house a back-up copy of every photo I've ever taken. I always burn my photos onto DVD so that they don't accumulate space on my lap top. That being said, I know that CDs and DVDs wear out over time. Given the nature of my photography, a more permanent back up is a smart idea to catalogue all this data.

So.

At about 6" tall, 2" wide, and 5" deep, this piece of hardware contains 2 terabytes (TB) of 'space'.

Two terabytes.

Can we just reflect on that for a minute?

2TB.
That's 2,000GB.
2,000,000MB.
2 trillion bytes.

At 2TB, this thing has just over double the hard drive capacity of my laptop. 250x more capacity than my iPhone. And almost 8,000x more capacity than the first Windows computer our family ever owned (if I remember correctly).

I'm not really surprised, and yet I'm continually surprised, by the way technology advances. It was not so long ago that megabytes were considered soooooooo huge, was it? And now I pull 2TB off the shelf expecting nothing less.

Crazy.







* "A few hours later..." I thought it odd that I couldn't create folders directly on the hard drive to start plunking photos into, but figured I could cut & paste from my laptop drive instead. After assembling some of my first digital photos into a folder, I attempted to copy it to the external drive; it didn't work. Upon further inspection, it turns out this hard drive is not Mac compatible. Grrrrrr. Apparently that was the other model I had been looking at. HP, you fail.

1 comment:

Sara said...

I hope you get a Mac compatible one soon! I love external hard drives so very much. Jeremy could probably give me one for a birthday or Christmas and I'd be more excited about that than most things. (I run out of space easily with all the non-loss video editing I do... I can't bear to save files in anything less than original quality, which is about 1 GB for 4.5 minutes...) My hard drive has 2 TB and I have almost that much in external drives as well. Just make sure you have -at least- 2 copies of everything important at all times, because external drives can fail just like a regular one, especially if you use it often for a few years. You probably know that, but I'm kind of a back up crazy-person. It literally makes me sick to my stomach when I hear about someone losing important memories!