1 Terabyte Hard Drive

A terabyte (TB) is 1000 Gigabytes (GB). A GB is 1000 megabytes (MB). A MB is 1000 kilobytes (KB). A KB is 1000 bytes or characters in computerese. (In actuality, a KB is 1024 bytes, but normally rounded off to 1000 for ease of computation.) I used to teach this stuff at SeniorNet, and never felt that the magnitude of these numbers ever sank in.

A TB is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes or characters! Now that's a lot of zeroes, and I have gone over that string several times to make sure I have it right! :-)

I have been waiting for what seems like a long time to buy a hard drive with a 1TB capacity. They have been around for a while but rather costly, and I had decided that when they were priced lower than $200 I would buy one. Well, thanks to Costco and one of their coupons, I purchased one last week for $199!

It is a Western Digital My Book Home Edition External Hard Drive. It comes in its own enclosure and attaches to a PC via a USB cable (it can also attach using FIREWIRE or eSATA).

I have plans for what I am going to do now that my desktop, with its internal 80GB hard drive and its external 250GB hard drive, have this new capacity available to me. Both my internal and external drives have been pushing the limits of their capacity. I have used the 250GB drive for backups mostly, maintaining several backups of my data at any one time.

I am planning to replace the 80GB drive with the 250GB drive. To do this I will need to make an exact copy of my current C drive on the external 250GB drive. For this I will use Norton Ghost. After making the copy, I'll physically replace the 80GB drive with the 250GB drive and hope I can then reboot my machine from the new internal 250GB drive. I will hold onto the 80GB drive, probably inserting it into the enclosure now housing the 250GB drive. The 80GB drive will be a good place to carry another backup copy of MY DOCUMENTS (all of my data).

I have already moved my My Documents folder to the external 1TB drive. To see how to move the location of your My Documents folder, see this handy Microsoft link:

How to Change the Default Location of the My Documents Folder

Below is what my 1TB drive looked like after I formatted it, getting rid of all the annoying "management" software included by Western Digital:

You can click on that image above to see the full sized version.

More on this subject as I progress with the above plan. If you have any questions, send me an e-mail.