The Terabyte Household

It seems we are now a Terabyte household....more than 1,000 GB of storage on the various PC's, external storage disks etc on the home network plus the DVR.

So, what does that mean?

A Terabyte stores very approximately (for comparison purposes)

- 1 million novels (c 1 MB / book)

- 1 million fairly high resolution photos ( c 1 MB/photo) - so a picture is worth about a hundred thousand words.

- About 4-6 years of fairly high quality IP voice conversation (audio quality that is, not content) - so assuming you chatter for about 6 minutes every waking hour of your life on average that's nearly everything you have ever said, and the replies you got. Hours of fun for the whole family.....

- About 250,000 pop songs of c 4 MB each at fairly standard mp3 quality- thats over 4 years of continuous (24x7x365) pop music - without the DJ drivel (see above for that...)

- For the truly sad, 40,000 hours of Mobile size movies (thats about 27,000 movies), or about 3,000 movies for a Nintendo DS or PDA.

- About 1,000 hours of VHS quality video (c 600 movies), or 200 hours of good DVD quality video at c 5 GB/ hour (c 120 movies).

- At VHS quality thats 120,000 30 sec pre-roll Ads....why have prisons when you could sentence felons to hours of Ad watching?

- A mere one third to one fifth of that for HDTV video movie - so only about 30 movies for that supercinema the basement has been converted to - choices eh?

But at the price of Terabits these days, you will so do all the above and then more for a few thousand bucks ( less than 50p ($1) per Gb, ie about £500 / $ 1,000 all in per Terabit). Two years ago the price was double that.

However, sorting out the metadata and search for all that will be quite a challenge...maybe in a few years Googe's video search (article here) will be localised for every Teraformed home??

How long before the Ten Terabyte Household is common? The Hundred? What will we do with it?

Looking at a representative sample of One (me), we were a 10 MB Household 20 years ago, a 10GB household 10 years ago - and we are now only a 1 Terabyte Household, so clearly 10 Terabytes is imminent.

As to what to do with it....thats about the length of my life on low res CCTV footage, so maybe we will all have P2P 24x7 "this is your life" by then? Or all of Paris Hilton's life? Or maybe life itself will be one big Big Brother.

Oh Goody.....