I’m not one to be spooked by technology but among my geeky friends the one thing we can still get nostalgic about is hard drives.
For instance: I remember my first hard drive. It was twenty megabytes and that was a large amount of space, at least double what most of my friends had at the time. It was huge and slow and loud and expensive.
Today I saw this external 750GB hard drive (7200RPM + 16MB cache!) on sale for $159.97 CAD.
Huge and cheap, amazing, etc, etc. The kicker hits me when I read: “This Drive Holds: 660 days of around-the-clock MP3 audio”. Man. Some sketchy perspective math:
- 660 days around-the-clock is 1.8 years of non-stop music, never repeating a single song.
- That’s 15,840 hours.
- That’s 990 days or 2.7 years of non-repeating music if we adjust for waking hours.
- 28 of these hard drives full of music would play for 75 years, the average American male’s life-span. Again never repeating a song.
- 28 drives (18,627,840 hours of music storage) would cost only $4,464 CAD.
- Digital downloads to fill those drives would cost roughly 370 million dollars.
I wonder how many hours of recorded music are out there. The iTunes Music Store has only 6 million songs in its catalog which would do you for the first 34 years I guess.
