storage

If you have tech lovers on your gift list this year, here are a few ideas that are sure to bring them holiday cheer.

I wrote a blog last year about the capacity of a one terabyte disk drive which are becoming standard in new personal computers. I thought that a terabyte of storage should be more than enough for a lifetime of computing. I failed to take into account the rising popularity of personal networks that store not only computer files but also entertainment such as movies and music. You can now access movies and shows from your smart TV that are stored on a drive attached to your network. To accommodate your growing storage needs, Western Digital offers My Cloud Mirror, which is network attached personal cloud storage. Your files are mirrored in case of disaster and are available from your TV, computer, or mobile device. You can watch your stored movies and access your pictures and data files from anywhere. This ranges from two all the way up to 12 terabytes to keep your favorite tech person going for a long time.

Paper Airplane 2.0

PowerUp paper airplanes may be just the gift for that person who has everything. These are not the airplanes we made as kids, they are a combination of paper and technology. The basic kit comes with a small motor but you still have to supply the paper and the navigation skills. Version 3.0 comes with a Bluetooth enabled module that allows you to control the plane from your smartphone or tablet. This is a Kickstarter project that has gone into production with different products. You can also pre-order the new PowerUp FPV kit that gives you first person view of the flight through a Google Cardboard viewer. There is even a boat for the sailor on your list.

Gift For The Budding Techie

A Raspberry Pi computer is perfect for the budding techie in your life. Made by a UK educational foundation of the same name, this is basically a low cost complete computer on a circuit board. It comes with HDMI and USB ports for connecting input and output devices and can be loaded with a special version of Linux as the basic operating system. There is no disk drive, but everything can be stored on SD cards. It represents a return to basic computing and experimentation. There is an ardent worldwide fan base for this product and no shortage of ideas posted to the web, from robot controllers to music and video servers to Christmas light display hubs. The Raspberry Pi Zero starts at $5 and the Pi 2 B runs $40. I have written before about the maker movement and this gift is a wonderful way to join in the fun.

It’s All In The Gesture

Gest is a wearable device that allows you to control your computer or tablet or smartphone through hand movements. It is still in Kickstarter mode and has been successfully funded so the device can be pre-ordered now. This is an attempt to get away from the traditional keyboard or touchpad. Personally, my fingers don’t seem to be precise when using my smartphone so I am looking forward to trying one of these in the future. This could be that gift that I give to myself.

Thoughts

There are a lot of products available for your tech friends, from the inexpensive to the unaffordable. I have chosen just a few here that I think are reasonable, useful, and sometimes just plain fun. What gifts are you giving your friends this holiday season? Let me know.

About Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional and assistant professor of practice for the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

I read an article a couple of weeks ago about Microsoft raising the Office 365 storage limit to one terabyte. Office 365 is a solution where the end user pays a monthly fee for the MS Office suite along with hosted storage on OneDrive. I really wonder how much storage is enough? Can I really generate and save enough Word, PowerPoint, or Excel files to fill one terabyte? I decided to dig into it further to see just what will fill 1,000 gigabytes.

Office Documents

It is estimated that 85,899,345 pages of Word documents would fill one terabyte. Now, if you can truly generate that much content, you have a serious archiving task on your hands. I am currently reading the book “John Adams” by David McCullough; it is approximately 650 pages long which means I could archive about 132,152 books of similar size. It has taken me nearly two months to read this book so it would take 66,076 months or 5,506 years to read my entire library. I cannot read that fast, nor do I have that much life left in me.

Music Files

Assuming that an average song takes up five megabytes, one terabyte could fit approximately 200,000 songs or 17,000 hours of music. How many songs do you have on your iTunes right now?

Movies

You could fit approximately 500 hours worth of movies on one terabyte. Assuming each movie is roughly 120 minutes long, that would be about 250 movies. I do know people who have that many movies in their library, so it is possible that they could build a database of movies to fill that space.

Pictures

You could fit approximately 310,000 photos in one terabyte. You could fit even more if you used a compression algorithm. How would you even catalog that many photos? By time, by subject, by category? Suddenly, we are facing big data issues in our personal lives, and we are going to need similar tools to be able to make sense of all of our potential data stores. With digital photography, it is possible to take a lot of photos without ever having to worry about development costs, so maybe 300,000 pictures is not out of the question.

Thoughts

With advances in technology, we have a lot of potential storage space available to us. Microsoft struck the opening salvo, but I expect Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and others to follow suit. One terabyte hard drives are not uncommon right now and even though we have the potential filespace, can we fill it responsibly? If we can fill it, do we have the skills and tools necessary to keep track of our digital belongings? Perhaps there is a new IT job category—personal archivist—created for those individuals drowning in their digital “stuff.” My point is that we need to take a step back and assess the data that we are keeping and ask ourselves: “Just because I can keep it all, do I need to? Do I have the skills and tools necessary to ever find what I am looking for?”

If we don’t need it and we can’t manage it, maybe it is time to clean out the digital garage. Do you need to clean out your digital garage? Let me know your thoughts.

About Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is an IT professional, adjunct faculty for the University of Oregon, and academic director of the UO Applied Information Management Master’s Degree Program. He writes about IT and business topics that keep him up at night.

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Tag Archives: storage

A Terabyte of Storage Space: How Much is Too Much?