A hard drive (HDD) is the device used to store large amounts of digital information in computers, iPods and games consoles such as the Xbox, etc. It consists of a motor, spindle, platters, read/write heads and other stuff...
A song usually takes up about 3 or 4 megabytes. A movie is usually compressed to about 700 megabytes (so it can fit on to a CD.) DVD movies usually have about 4.3 gigabytes of various files on them.
Blank DVDs can carry almost 5 gigabytes of information and some types of blank DVDs can do double that.
In a few years we'll all have HDVD or 'Blue Ray' players which carry up to 30 gigabytes of date on one disk...
But now it has been revealed that a single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB or 4,000 gigabytes) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi.
The company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousands times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Hitachi said the advance would fuel the "terabyte era", with a 4TB drive able to hold more than a million songs. Hello Napster!!!
The biggest hard drive at the moment is one terabyte but they are bloody expensive.
So - how big is yours?
The ones that come in your laptop or computer may be filling up if you download videos and lots of music.
The one in my laptop is 120 gigabytes... which is way to little so I have 3 USB hard drives plugged in to my computer each one of which is another 500 gigabytes...
I'll have to buy a new one soon as the third one is now over half full.
Bring on the 4 terabyte drives NOW!!! I don't want to wait another four years!
A song usually takes up about 3 or 4 megabytes. A movie is usually compressed to about 700 megabytes (so it can fit on to a CD.) DVD movies usually have about 4.3 gigabytes of various files on them.
Blank DVDs can carry almost 5 gigabytes of information and some types of blank DVDs can do double that.
In a few years we'll all have HDVD or 'Blue Ray' players which carry up to 30 gigabytes of date on one disk...
But now it has been revealed that a single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB or 4,000 gigabytes) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi.
The company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousands times smaller than the width of a human hair.
Hitachi said the advance would fuel the "terabyte era", with a 4TB drive able to hold more than a million songs. Hello Napster!!!

The biggest hard drive at the moment is one terabyte but they are bloody expensive.
So - how big is yours?

The ones that come in your laptop or computer may be filling up if you download videos and lots of music.
The one in my laptop is 120 gigabytes... which is way to little so I have 3 USB hard drives plugged in to my computer each one of which is another 500 gigabytes...
I'll have to buy a new one soon as the third one is now over half full.
Bring on the 4 terabyte drives NOW!!! I don't want to wait another four years!

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