Too much tech
By Jonathan Kay (bio)
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So far, the blockbuster tech event of 2007 has been Microsoft’s Jan. 31 release of Windows Vista. But to my mind, Hitachi Ltd. hit an even bigger technological milestone just a few weeks earlier.
From the outside, Hitachi’s ground-breaking Deskstar 7K1000 may look like your run-of-the-mill sandwich-sized computer hard drive. But inside, it holds a terabyte of data.
Most of us already have enough trouble keeping our megs and gigs straight without another data prefix to worry about. But bear with me — this is important.
A terabyte is a trillion bytes of data — a thousand gigabytes. That means with a single US$399 Hitachi disk drive, you’ll now be able to store the text of about a million books — more than are contained in many respectably-sized university libraries.
Or, you could use it to store about a quarter-million songs — more music than you and all your ancestors ever stockpiled on CD, LP, tape, 8-track and Berliner combined.
That fancy super-high-resolution digital camera you got for Christmas? Your terabyte drive will store about 200,000 photos. Or you can shoot YouTube-quality video and have enough space for several years worth of footage. Go on — hit the record button. Why let a single second of your life go unfilmed?
But here’s the rub: How much of your life is worth filming? Or photographing? How many albums will you ever have time to listen to? It’s fantastic that Hitachi’s new hard drive has enough room for François Truffaut’s complete 26-volume filmography in high definition. But when are you going to find time to watch it? Hitachi’s creation is an astonishing engineering achievement: In the space of just 20 years, computer hard-drive capacity has increased by a geometric factor of 100,000. Yet it also symbolizes something else — an age in which digital technology has become so advanced that it’s outstripped our use for it.
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