Gadget lust

[trixtah]

One terabyte. USB2. $AU1200.

OMFG.

Actually, I've noticed a trend where terabytes etc are expressed as 1000GB, when of course, they should be 1024GB. What do we call them then? Metric terabytes?

Comments

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Marketing terabytes.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Lord.

Coincidentally, I've been reading Weasel Words (http://www.weaselwords.com.au/) (the book) this week. Seems strangely apposite.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

*ponder* ... you know, that's not actually that cheap.

I have a 250GB disk that I bought for about $230 almost a year ago, and a case I chucked it in that cost me $50. I have a second 250GB disk sitting idle because I need a) to take it into the office and fsck it, as I can't figure out how to do that to an ext2 disk under OSX, and b) get a case for it, or else keep swapping back and forth. But the point is that I have half that storage for approx half that price, albeit taking theoretically twice the USB ports.

A terabyte's just not as big as it used to be. I'd fill it in a matter of days with DVD rips for vidding.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not that cheap compared to buying lots of smaller disks. It's the all-in-oneness that got me (although there are bound to be multiple platters in there). And the one USB port to drive the thing. I'm sure they'll drop in price, at some point.

And it has a pretty blue light. :-)

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Oh, I nearly forgot, in case you weren't aware of it, there's a suite of Ext2 utilities (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/) for Macs which an ex-colleague of mine swears by. It includes fsck and mkfs.

I've used the NT-y/Win2K versions from Sourceforge and it works perfectly well.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's what I have, but the documentation is inadquate and while I could get fsck to run, I couldn't get it to *stop* running. It seemed inordinately slow, which is why I gave up and am going to take the disk in to work to do it on a linux box.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Marketing has used metric denominations solidly ever since the kilo/mega/giga/tera/etc prefixes were officially redefined in 1999 to be metric by the international Electrotechnical Commission. The redefinition became a full IEEE standard last March. Marketeers also used metric before '99, because they're weasels.

About the only items which still use the old meanings for the words are RAM chips.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Jeeze, what is happening in the world when even the IEEE-geeks succumb to the evils of marketing-speak? *sigh*

I had no bloody idea.

[tygerr.livejournal.com]

Eh, 1000 or 1024 is pretty irrelevant, really--ALL the whoosis-byte labelling is fictive. You're doing *well* if you get 90% of the listed capacity as genuine usable space, so I just use the label capacity as a ranking method: I might not know how much it'll *really* hold, but 1 TB is bigger than 750 MB and smaller than 1.2 TB.

It's kind of like the temperature ratings on sleeping bags. I can guarantee you I'll freeze my a** off if I'm in a -10C-rated bag on a -10C night, but at least I'll be warmer than if I were in a 0C bag.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, too true. Once you've got the filesystem in place, it's really a punt as to how much actual space is available. "Ranking method" is an apt way of putting it, indeed.