The amazing storage capacity of the terabyte hard drive
When computers first hit the market, their storage capacity was measured in mere megabytes, and the per megabyte cost of storage was often prohibitively high. Few but the biggest companies could afford to purchase computers even for the most critical applications, and the world of the desktop PC was all but unknown. These days, however, storage capacities are growing exponentially, and the terabyte hard drive is no longer an unknown entity. These days even the most basic computer hard drives often have storage capacities which are measured in the hundreds of gigabytes, and the smallest hard drives available in many commercial PCs are 200 gigabytes, 300 gigabytes, or even more. It is not unusual to find even personal hard drives with a capacity of 500 gigabytes, making it a half terabyte hard drive. There are many reasons why a computer user would need to have this much storage capacity. While the first PCs stored only a limited number of different files, and those files were generally quite small, these days there are many very large files stored on the average PC. From music files to digital photographs, there are many large files that need to be stored, and there are reasons why a 500 gigabyte or even a terabyte hard drive may be needed. In the world of the home user, this enormous storage capacity is often needed to store video files or movies. The world of on demand movies is a fast growing one, and movies take up a huge amount of storage space. Any user who plans to use his or her computer to store and play movies will need to have a very large hard drive indeed. Of course the true terabyte hard drive still more likely to be seen in the world of business, and there are many businesses that need to store huge amounts of information about clients, customers, employees and others. These large volumes of data can be vital to the business, so it is important for the business to have enough storage capacity in place. Terabyte hard drives can also be used as file servers, and these large file servers are great for storing user files and other important data. When companies build file servers they will of course need to plan for future growth and expansion, and building more storage capacity than is currently needed is always a smart move. As the computer industry continues to grow, and as the cost of data storage continues to decline, there are likely to be more and more terabyte hard drives hitting the market. While the prices of these high capacity hard drives are still somewhat high, the prices are expected to fall in the future, making very high storage capacity affordable for more and more businesses and more and more average computer owners.
|
