Terabyte, Tebibye

At makes an impressive pile. It's also a fair wad of cash, and would be more money than even Bill Gates can put his hands on. Well, Bill's working at it, but the rest of us know we can't get there. The hairs on your head might number around a quarter million, so you'd need four million people to get a terabyte of hair strands. Limit the eligibility to middle aged men and you might need a few more. Fine sand seems to represent large numbers in fairly small volumes, sometimes estimated at 10,000 grains per cubic centimeter. We'd need 100 million cubic centimeters to get a terabyte, which is bigger than I want to store in my back yard. The point is that even a terabyte of data is a tremendous amount. It seems we really are getting awful close to "big enough" for personal storage, though "fast enough" is still a long way off. *Originally published at