Sep 2010 2tb hard drives make the wheezing supercomputer you used to have in your office look like an abacus. A really slow one, made of mud. A pair of 2tb hard drives could hold more processing power in their little electronic finger than your old state of the art PC would be able to fit if you’d jacked it in to an external hard drive the size of your house. That’s how far 2tb hard drives show we’ve come.
2tb hard drives are, for now anyway, the ultimate example of the computer industry’s astonishing (some might say, ridiculous) growth patterns. 2tb hard drives exemplify the way in which computer technology grows exponentially, which is different to most normal industry growth in that it doesn’t double, or triple, over a 10 year period but goes so far out of sight that you have to make up a whole new set of measurements just to keep track of it. 2tb hard drives seem pretty normal now, but if you’d have mentioned them 10 years ago even Japanese people would have looked at you like you’d just dropped in from another planet.
Here’s the thing: exponential growth doesn’t happen in technology. Exponential growth is what bacterium do. 2tb hard drives are the latest evidence that the computer industry grows its gadgets as rapidly as cells grow in a petri dish – which is to say, so quickly that they can make a whole body (a body is made up of more than 100 trillion cells) in nine months. 2tb hard drives are to the computers of the ‘90s what a human being is to a spermatozoa – so much more complex and cunningly engineered that it’s only the direct relationship between the two that proves there is any connection at all.
So. When you get your 2tb hard drives, spare a thought for the poor sperm that was once your high-powered pride and joy. If you tried to plug 2tb hard drives into that, it’d run so fast the screen would blow up. And you’ll still need to upgrade from 2tb hard drives to whatever comes next…
