gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

The black box

I work for the CBC Digital Archives website (I think it's OK to say that, right?)

Anyhow, we process a boatload of audio and video. English and French combined, there are more than 12,000 clips online already, with at least 400 more hours in the works in English alone. And since we're redesigning the site to accomodate bigger, better quality video, we thought we'd better upgrade our storage capacity.

The solution, for the moment, is a black box like the one shown here. To be precise, it's a LaCie 2.5 terabyte Biggest S2S RAID storage tower. To be impresice, it's an external hard drive about the size of a shoe box. It weighs a ton, and holds an inconceivable amount of data.

A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. So this shoe box holds 2,500 gigs - 10 times the amount of data my reasonably new home computer can store. We figure that'll hold all the high-res videos we are encoding this year.

Which made me wonder how much consumer-level media a drive like this could handle.

So I saved a typical, decent quality YouTube file - in this case, Johnny Cash's Hurt video (and yeah, I had a little cry first.) It runs about four minutes, and takes up a little over nine megabytes.

Math time:

• 4 minutes = 9 MB
• 1 hour = 135 MB
• 1 day = 3,240 MB (3.24 GB)
• 1 year = 1,183 GB

So... if I were to film myself 24 hours a day in YouTube quality Flash video, I could store a two full years of my life - every second of it - on this one drive.

(I'd upload it, but it'd take you two full years to watch... you might want to fast forward to the good bits. Heck, I'd like to too.)

Yes, I'm playing fast and loose with numbers here - significant rounding of digits, and the drive can't hold the full 2.5 TB, and Flash video sucks, but you get the point.

Now, how much audio would it hold?

Well, my 15 GB iPod is less than half full (5.6 GB) with 1,567 songs. According to iTunes, that's enough music to play for 4.2 days without repeating.

If I were to somehow hook up the black box to my iPod, I could hold 446 times as many songs - almost 700,000 songs, enough to last 1,873 days. That's five straight years of 24/7 music without hearing the same song twice.

Might want to bring the charger, though. Can I borrow some CDs?

One final thought:

Five years ago, the biggest available hard drive for a typical PC was 120 GB, and cost $750. (Our laCie costs around twice that, which would have got you 240 GB in 2002.) Today, that money gets you 10 times as much storage. So it's reasonable to assume that five years from now, the same drive will hold more than 25 TB.

Meaning that for a couple of grand, you could record every second of your life - from birth to death - on video, and store it in one small black box.