"Seagate said it's shipped the equivalent of 79 million terabytes of storage since the company made its first hard drive in 1979."

Surely they mean 75 exabytes?

Nice one though your forgetting to add on the warranty replacements, which should bring it closer to 937,123,763.

Though I do wonder does that number include Maxtor drives as well?

When you buy a dozen eggs, you don't get 16. When you buy 100 CDs, you don't get 128. When you're going 30km/hour, you're not going 32,768 meters per hour.

The only reason "kilobyte", "megabyte" and "gigabyte" have been used to represent 1,024, 1,048,576, and 1,073,741,824 bytes respectively is because it was and is illogical and impractical to package RAM in quantities of 1,000, 1,000,000, and 1,000,000,000 bytes. It was easier to refer to 1,024 bytes as a kilobyte rather than 1.024 kilobytes. THAT's where the inaccuracy is. Hard drive manufacturers (bless their kind souls) have been maintaining the purity of the decimal prefixes all this time, bearing the full brunt of your petty wrath.

The "U.S. Billion", when applied to such things as memory or hard drives, follows the SI prefixes (http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html). It's been nearly a decade since these standards were adopted. If the drive makers can't get their act together and use the right prefixes, then don't blame the U.S.

How many Paris Hilton photos could we have stored on all those HDDs?

Not only did I hear a similar story which relates to Moore's Law, but apparently if the cars had reduced in size in a similar fashion to storage devices, your Rolls Royce would be the size of a matchbox.

Steven, they haven't been maintaing the purity of the decimal prefixes all this time. There was a time when they used powers of two. Up until drives hit about 200MB. In one week, I bought a WD Caviar drive with geometry of 987x12x35 which was labelled as 200MB and then another instance of the same model drive (WD1200 or something) days later with the same geometry of 987x12x35 and it was labelled as 212MB (it's 212244480 bytes).

That's the week they changed their behaviour from one that make sense to computer scientists to the marketing-prefered "our drives are bigger now" model.

The documentation for the drive claimed they were doing it for consistency because DOS' CHKDSK command quoted megabytes as being 1,000,000 bytes. Which is FALSE. CHKDSK always quoted bytes, with commas separating the thousands. It never claimed that the second comma from the right denoted a megabyte.

How much of that is used to store smut, off colour jokes illegal Mp3 and movie files. A good percentage I'd wager ..

...about my wondering when a single drive would have the same capacity as their combined sales to date, but then I saw the first three comments.

That's well and good, but I would like to point out, for the record, that if anyone so much as *thinks* about advocating that we all go around saying "mebibytes" and "kibibytes", I swear on all that is holy that I will hunt him down and murder him with a plastic spork.

That is all.

A few comments have hit on it, but the top 3 just scream too much ignorance to be left alone.

MB = 1,000,000 bytes

MiB = 2^20 Bytes (1,048,576 bytes)

GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes

GiB = 2^30 bytes (1,073,741,824 bytes)

So when you buy a 500GB drive you get 500,000,000,000 bytes of storage. Not 500*2^30 bytes of storage.

We all know that 1024 does not equal 1000, don't make your stupidity known by ignoring long existing standards. Try following Acme Fixer's link, and you'll see that this standard was adopted about 10 years ago for dealing with binary quantities. I will agree with Wiernicki that nobody should adopt these in speech, but but at least be aware of the facts.

"It's better to remain silent and appear foolish than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" - take note

Devil bill because too much of that 79TB is housing bill's handy work (rather, somebody else's handy work that bill bought and subsequently ruined, quite infectiously)

Use an IDE cable and hang them or a SATA one and whip them! mwahahah

Just quote the damn drive size in bits then we can see its true size with no issue.............

"Not only did I hear a similar story which relates to Moore's Law, but apparently if the cars had reduced in size in a similar fashion to storage devices, your Rolls Royce would be the size of a matchbox."

That is quite good - considering that a matchbox cost less than two euros... except that it obviously does not have a working engine etc... but this could not possibly matter since you could not drive it anyway.. on the other hand matchbox cars are apparantly still popular considering that both of my daughters love to play with them most every day.

Paris - because I bet she has a collection of hot wheels in the closet...

I wonder how many of those were shipped to replace defective units under warranty?

Well said.

Of course, the real reason for having things like 1GB == 2^30 bytes is that it can be addressed by exactly 30 bits. Admitedly its more relevant for memory than disks (otherwise you'd find that when you install four 1GB memory sticks each holding 10^9 bytes that you've got annoying holes in the physical memory map). On the other hand, a sector is still 512 bytes (2^9) and file system blocks are an exact number of sectors (eg 2^12) for exactly the same reason: given an offset in bytes the block number and offset are easy to compute.

And don't go giving me guff about computers are plenty fast enough to have, say, 1000 disk sectors -- it runs much, much deeper than that.

It's all confusing. There are two billions - the US one (10^9) and the UK one (10^12) which is admittedly not in common use these days.

There's also the kilo/kibi debacle which I think is only useful when the general public isn't involved - I can barely get my father to correlate RAM and disk space (which reminds me - disc (optical, and magneto-optical based on MiniDisc) vs disk (everything else)) let alone the differences between how they're measured. (Son, why does it say I've got a 74GB disk when it says 80GB on the box?)

Not to mention you can go even deeper by investigating the acronyms for bits and bytes - one standard (IEEE 1541) says b=bit and B=byte where another (IEC 60027) says bit=bit and B=byte, because bit is already an abbreviation of Binary Digit. I still refer to 8Mbit/s DSL speeds.

I'm waiting for the Reg to come up with a standard for us all to use for data storage measurement in addition to linguine for distance - such as PoPH (Pictures of Paris Hilton) for small measures, and VMC (Virgin Media Caps) for larger ones

I outright refuse to use the travesty of "Kirbybytes" to refer "1024-byte kilobytes" in any kind of use!

As some have noted, the kilo- mega- giga- prefix family has been 1024-based because of technical reasons, and the only idiots that decided to do this otherwise were the HD manufacturers.

Then some zealot purists decided to "end the ambiguity" and declare the Men In Black ... um... I mean the binary prefixes, making all the damn thing worse for actual computer users, and enabling HDD manufacturers to get away with their shoddy practices.

Hey, even real mathematicians/engineers joke about the absurdity:

http://www.xkcd.com/394

and one poster in the forums summed it up all in one line:

"I hate "kibibyte," "gibibyte," etc. It is pedantry of the worst kind."

Pedantry indeed.

All in, it cost me £1000 and I connected that to my TRS80 Model 1 Level 2 !! It was a significant improvement on the audio cassette deck that it replaced !!

Now kiddies complain that 80GB is not enough !!

If I've done my maths right, £151,400,000 - how many Rolls Royces would that have bought!