The Sandisk USB 3.0 flash disk offers a massive capacity for a reasonable price. With a transfer rate of 190 Megabytes per second, this drive will be able to copy large files to and fro with a minimum of waiting time. On Amazon, this drive retails for US$79.88, this is an incredible price for a 64 Gigabyte USB thumb drive. Another method of storage is an external hard disk. This example, a 4 Terabyte external hard disk is a device containing two hard disks that are written to simultaneously, protecting the data that is stored on the drives from corruption. This is only US$317.99, a very good deal considering the capacity. Of course you could purchase a couple of 2 Terabyte hard disks and build your own RAID array to store data, but this external hard disk is put together already and is ready to plug in and use. A bare 3 Terabyte hard disk is under US$150.00 on Amazon, and two or three of these in your PC would allow a massive amount of storage for a cheap price.
The amount of storage space available these days is incredible, if you had four 3 Terabyte hard disks in your computer, you would have plenty of storage space for your computer files. With a modern file-system like XFS or Btrfs, the performance of the disks would be far superior to any drive with an NTFS file-system, when I use that file-system on Windows, it is not as fast when copying large files as Linux is when I am using EXT4 or my current XFS files-system. With such a large amount of data stored, it would be prudent to make copies of valuable files, so that in the case of a hard disk failure, you do not lose all of your files at once. We could have 64 Terabyte hard disk drives in the future, that would be more than enough for everyone. This 256 Gigabyte USB flash disk that I saw sounds incredible, but you would need to make sure it was a reliable brand. In Star Trek they store TeraQuads of data, but I have no idea what that is supposed to represent.
Units of computer storage measurement.
- 8 bits = 1 Byte.
- 1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte.
- 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte.
- 1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte.
- 1024 Terabytes = Petabyte.
- 1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte.
- 1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte.
- 1024 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte.
- 1024 Yottabyes = 1 Brontobyte.
This goes to show that the fictional units of measurement in the show must be unimaginably larger than our current units of measurement.
Source: http://www.whatsabyte.com/. Visit the link for yet another unit I left off. You can not even imagine 1024 Yottabytes of data.