Think you’ve got lots of hard drive space in your notebook computer with a 250 GB hard drive? Well, think again. 500 GB notebook hard drives are coming. Thats right, all the top players in the notebook hard drive industry have recently released 500 GB hard drives for installation in notebook computers; Samsung, Fujitsu, and Hitachi will be shipping the high capacity hard drives in Serial ATA configurations.
To demonstrate how much capacity 500 GB storage really is, here is a breakdown of storage size measurements:
1 KB = 1024 bytes = 1,024 bytes
1 MB = 1 megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes
1 GB = 1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes
1 TB = 1 terrabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
So, 500 GB is equal to: 500,000,000,000 bytes. Which is half a terrabyte, a terrabyte is 1000 GB or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Ok, that really does not paint a picture of how big it really is for non-techies. On a 500 GB hard drive, you can store up to:
500 hours of digital video
178 feature length movies
250 games
or 125,000 four-minute songs
Amazing, Right? I think so! Having half a terrabyte in a notebook computer is an insane amount of storage. And if you got one of those fancy high end notebook computers that accept two hard drives and support RAID 0, you can have 1 TB of total storage on the go! Super computer in your gear bag, indeed!
Expect prices of 500GB notebook hard drives to ballpark in the $300 range.
