How Big is 1.5TB?

My laptop has a 100GB disk and it is almost full.

My own data take about 45GB and Microsoft uses the rest. All my email and their attachment use about 1GB. I am very diligent in pruning email messages. In fact, I systematically delete old messages once in a while.

According to iTunes, my entire music collection takes up 17GB. That will be 3,610 songs (roughly 4MB each) playable in 10.9 days straight. Honestly, I have not heard all my music yet. I am listening to an epic audio book. There are 328 episodes, each one roughly 30 minutes, or 25MB each. This means the entire book, listenable in 164 hours, takes up 8GB of storage.

I keep all my pictures too. There are roughly 11,000 pictures of my recent life. They consume less than 9GB. I shoot pictures mostly in 2048×1536 resolution, or 700KB each. I found this resolution good enough for practically all my purposes. I print out roughly 30 of them every year to put in a traditional photo album.

Once in a while, I would download a TV episode or two. An hour of HDTV program takes about 350MB, very viewable and enjoyable on my computer or iPod Touch.

I use an ISP for my web presence, this blog part of it. They charge me $5 each month for 120GB of storage. I now have used 12GB, hosting 4 blogs, two web sites, and photo sharings. My largest blogs, this one, has 250 posts since 2005. Its entire database takes up 40MB of space.

When Wife came back home from Costco and told me the Seagate FreeAgent 1.5TB home storage unit. I was flabbergasted.

1.5 Tera Bytes! That’s 32 months’ of continuously playing music, 225 thousands full-length movies, or 768 years of photos. It takes months for a decent broadband connection to download that much data. For all practical purposes, that’s infinite amount of storage for me.

Yet, I said the same thing when 640MB hard disk came to existence.