I just got three new My Passport FireWire external hard drives. 2 TB each. Then it occurred to me... My first Mac in 1984 used a single 400K floppy disk for the OS, App, and Files.
So take a look. On the left, 6 TB. And on the right, 400K. The stack on the left is the equivalent of 15,000,000 of those blue things on the right. Let me repeat: 15,000,000. How can I wrap my mind around that?
These floppies are ⅛ inch thick. Stack 15 million of them, and they'd tower 29.59 miles high. That's many times higher than jets fly.
Fifteen million:
- A Megabyte = 1000 K
A Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes (1000 x 1000K)
A Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes (1000 x 1000 x 1000K) So...
A TB = 1 Billion KB. That’s 2.5 million 400K floppies. Here are 6 TB, times 2.5 million... that’s 15 million of these little dudes.
- 15,000,000 x .125” = 1,875,000 inches
÷ 12” per foot,
÷ 5280 ft per mile,
= 29.5928 miles of 400K floppies.
- 15,000,000 x .125” = 1,875,000 inches
I've already got 10 drives of 1TB or greater, internal SATA and external Firewire, most of which are 2TB, along with four 3TB and one 4TB thrown in. I never really thought about just how awesome are those kinds of numbers. So, when these new drives came in, there was a 400K floppy sitting nearby. Suddenly it dawned on me. I got out the calipers and measured the thickness, did the math, and voila... I finally wrapped my mind around it.
If you laid that many floppies down, end to end, you'd look pretty silly and probably get sore from bending over. But they'd stretch 875.94969696969697 miles. I seriously doubt they even MADE that many 400K floppies. The 3.5" floppy disks encased in a plastic shell were considered new and heralded as products of miniaturization when released in early 1984. By year's end they were already pushing the 800K floppy, soon followed by the 1.4MB floppy, all in the same sized shell. My first hard drive was 10MB, and I thought it was limitless. Ah, the age before digital movie libraries.
I had to do the math several times before I believed I was doing it correctly. You're welcome to check it for me, but you'll find the same conclusions I did. Hard drives that store terabytes of information are frickin' huge!
Hugh Mongoose Lee huge. It's a high-tech world out there.
Shooshie