As we all know, the storage capacity of a hard drive is expressed in bytes. 1 byte is the smallest unit of storage. 1KB (kilobyte) means 1024 bytes, 1MB means 1024 KB, 1GB (gigabyte) means 1024 MB, and 1TB (terabyte) means 1024 GB.
1KB (kilobyte) represents 1024 bytes, 1MB represents 1024 KB, 1GB (gigabyte) represents 1024 MB, and 1TB (terabyte) represents 1024 GB. 1TB represents 1024 GB.
So, how big is 1TB byte?
Gordon Bell, chief computer scientist at Microsoft's San Francisco labs, has done a description of the problem, how you can use up 1TB of bytes in a year.
1) Assuming that color photos are 300KB jpeg files each, then 1TB bytes can store a total of about 3.6 million photos, which equates to 9,800 photos you store every day for a year.
2) Assuming text files are 1MB each, then 1TB bytes can store about 1 million text files, which is equivalent to 2900 files you store every day in a year.
3) Assuming the music file is recorded with a sampling frequency of 256K/s, then 1TB bytes can store about 9300 hours of music in total, which is equivalent to 26 hours of music you store per day in a year.
4) Assuming that the video file is recorded at 1.5M/s, then 1TB of bytes can store about 1600 hours of video, which is equivalent to 4 hours of video storage per day for a year.
Please note that the file standards above are set very loosely, and we tend not to adopt such high standards in real life. For example, most MP3 files are sampled at 128K/s, while text files are often only a few tens or hundreds of kilobytes large. On the other hand, the files above are raw and uncompressed, or they could be smaller. So that means that 1TB bytes can fit into a lot more.
Now, let's look at how to use those 1TB bytes in a way that is closer to reality.
1) All the words a person has read in a lifetime don't add up to more than a few gigabytes.In fact, 1 GB can store more than 500 million Chinese characters, which is equivalent to more than 700 120-volume books. This means that less than 0.5% of the 1TB of text is stored.
2) Assuming you've taken a total of 100,000 photos in your lifetime, each of which averages 100KB, that's also a total of only 10 GB, which is only 1% of 1TB.
3) Assuming you've listened to thousands of records in your lifetime, storing them all in mp3 format, even if you have 200GB, that's 20% of 1TB.
4) The remaining 800GB can be divided in half, with half of the 400GB used to store movies, which can store about 100+ DVDs, and the other half of 400GB used to store TV shows, which can store about 250 hours of HD TV shows. For most people, this amount of space to store videos is more than enough.
See, 1 terabyte is completely enough to store all the information a person produces in a lifetime - text, photos, audio and video.
1TB hard drives are already sold in the market today, and the current price is around 2500 RMB. By 2010, it could drop to less than $1,000. So, Gordon Bell predicts that in the future, people won't delete any files at all, not even the delete command in the operating system. The reason is that the value of the time you use to delete a file already exceeds the value of the hard drive space it takes up.