Steph just asked me if I was doing a blog post tonight and I told her my computer was busy. Man is it, I love my computer! My new four terabyte WD external drive arrived today and I’m setting it up as my system backup. I’m compressing backup videos from my old external drive in the background while running a complete drive test on the new drive. New software is also being installed while I write this post. I guess there are not many limits to busy.
It’s a good time to recount and old tech story. Back at the turn of the eighties I was the primary computer consultant for Interocean Steamship Company in San Francisco. We were running a state of the art IBM System 38 and the company shelled out fifty grand for a gorgeous one gigabyte hard drive. This thing was amazing, standing four feet square and on wheels, it was a marvel of technology. That gigabyte of storage was the envy of other companies running IBM hardware, up and down the coast. I was programming that system in RPG-3 and I couldn’t even dent that much space.
Obviously I’ve been at this a long time and I’ve watched the storage expand while the price dropped, with amazement. So, lets refresh the math here: One gigabyte is a thousand megabytes (1,000,000,000 bytes) and a terabyte is a thousand gigabytes (1,000,000,000,000 bytes). The drive sitting on my desk, that I bought for $160.00, is four terabytes.
Tonight I’m running a data backup to the new drive, tomorrow a Windows 7 system backup during the day while I’m at work and then I’ll clone my entire drive. I’ve also just finished backing up my PC computer past dating back to the early 90’s in Kent, WA.
I cleared off a lot of desk space to make room for this huge drive :-)
Breaking my brain cells. That little square is your drive holding all that info? You can put that in your pocket. No wheels needed.
Yep :-)