Shouldn't one write "500 GiB" drives, not "500GB drives" - "Gi" being the
prefix that represents 2^30 as opposed to "G" being the prefix that refers to
10^9. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte and also the IEC standard IEC
60027-2
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Millet
To: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2007 4:45 PM
Subject: [USMA:37919] Re: mega,giga,tera
I had quite a few customers do a double take when they saw our Western
Digital 1TB drive at work the other day. It's actually two 500GB drives in the
case but one customer expressed it well by saying "Why do they have to keep
getting bigger I just got used to gigabytes being bigger than megabytes" .
One thing that confuses customers quite a bit is when they see a computer
with 1024MB of memory and they're told that's one Gigabyte. I know it stems
from the differences between a hard drive gigabyte and memory gigabyte but even
regular non metric consumers somehow sense that they should be rounded numbers
in powers of 1000, especilaly since many of them were taught that a gigabyte of
hard disk space was the same as 1000MB.
Although one good sign from all this terminology is that when I tell most
customers that the units are part of SI their first reaction usually is
"Really? That's metric huh? I never thought about that I just use it". Once we
hit the point where that is used everywhere in the United States and worldwide
and SI is absorbed so thoroughly in the lexicon I think we can consider our
jobs done :).
Mike
On 2/3/07, Paul Trusten, R.Ph. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My first computer, a Mac Classic, did not come with a hard drive. I had to
have
it installed for extra money. It had a storage capacity of 40 megabytes.
Since then, gigabytes have entered the consumer lexicon as data storage
capacities rose. With the arrival of terabyte-size drives, we have another
SI
prefix, "tera," that will get wide public exposure.
In my pharmacy studies, I did come across the femtoliter as a laboratory
quantity. In fact, it was in a text explaining the nature of the difference
between U.S. and SI laboratory quantities.
Quoting Carleton MacDonald < [EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Although the press release (and their web site) are mentioning a 3.5
"inch"
> form factor, it is highly unlikely that it is actually being manufactured
to
> that non-standard. This is probably a 90 mm disk, with the size
description
> dumbed down for the American audience, and reflects the continuing
> convention to use American measurement, not used anywhere else in the
world,
> to describe certain computer features.
>
>
>
> That said, a big hard drive will certainly be useful.
>
>
>
> Carleton
>
>
>
>
> http://news.
>
<http://news.com.com/Here+comes+the+terabyte+hard+drive/2100-1041_3-6147409.
> html> com.com/Here+comes+the+terabyte+hard+drive/2100-1041_3-6147409.html
>
> Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive
> companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi
> was only off by a few days.
>
> The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a
> 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter,
> then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for
> digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual
> Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage
> systems.
>
> The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 when it comes out. That comes to
> about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar
> 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1 terabyte
> drive in the first half of 2007.
>
> The two companies, along with others, will tout their new drives at the
> upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and will show off
> hybrid hard drives, as well.
>
> A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a million megabytes, or 1,000
> gigabytes, as measured by the hard-drive industry. (There are actually
> two conventions for calculating megabytes, but this is how the drive
> industry counts it.) As a reference, the print collection in the Library
> of Congress comes to about 10 terabytes of information, according to the
> How Much Information study from U.C. Berkeley. The report also found
> that 400,000 terabytes of e-mail get produced per year. About 50,000
> trees would be necessary to create enough paper to hold a terabyte of
> information, according to the report.
>
> Who needs this sort of storage capacity? You will, eventually, said Doug
> Pickford, director of market and product strategy at Hitachi. Demand for
> data storage capacity at corporations continues to grow, and it shows no
> sign of abating. A single terabyte drive takes up less space than four
> 250GB drives, which lets IT managers conserve on computing room real
> estate. The drive can hold about 330,000 3MB photos or 250,000 MP3s,
> according to Hitachi's math.
>
> Consumers, meanwhile, are gobbling up more drive capacity because of
> content like video. An hour of standard video takes up about 1GB, while
> an hour of high-definition video sucks up 4GB, Pickford said.
>
> Consumers, though, tend to be skeptical of ever needing more storage
> capacity.
>
> "We heard that when we brought out 1 gigabyte drives," Pickford said.
>
> The boost in capacity for desktop drives comes in part through the
> introduction of perpendicular recording technology to 3.5-inch-diameter
> drives. In perpendicular drives, data can be stored in vertical columns,
> rather than on a single plane. Drive makers have already released
> notebook drives, which sport smaller 2.5-inch-diameter drives, with
> perpendicular recording. The 1 terabyte drives will be Hitachi's first
> 3.5-inch drives with perpendicular recording.
>
> Drive makers convert to perpendicular recording when the need for areal
> density, the measure of how much data can be crammed into a square inch,
> passes 125 gigabits. The terabyte drive (and the 750GB drive) can hold
> 148 gigabits per square inch, or 148 billion bits. Hitachi's previous
> 3.5-inch drives maxed out at 115 gigabits per square inch.
>
> The hard drive turned 50 last year, and over the past five decades data
> capacity has increased at a fairly regular and rapid pace. The first
> drive, which came with the RAMAC computer, weighed about a ton and held
> 5MB of data.
>
> Hard-drive scientists say that increases in capacity will continue
> because of technologies like heat-assisted recording and patterned
>
>
--
Paul Trusten, R.Ph.
Public Relations Director
U.S. Metric Association, Inc.
Phone (432)528-7724
www.metric.org
3609 Caldera Boulevard, Apartment 122
Midland TX 79707-2872 USA
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://home.grandecom.net/~trusten
--
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it why can't you?"
