Sitting around on a lazy Sunday morning, I reach for the full-colored advertisements of the many electronics stores.  A guilty pleasure, I enjoy looking for the latest gizmo of the week, or what new computer or peripheral is on sale. The LA Times' feature stories, weather, business, and yes, the horse racing results would have to wait until I see what new electronic wonders are out there. Some of the equipment descriptions may intimidate the less techno-savvy person - they assume that we should all know what they are talking about. It was all too obvious that not every common person understands the “lingo”, as I found out later while walking the isles of my favorite electronic circus.  I overheard a conversation between a middle-aged father and a sales clerk. I noticed the father’s frustration while he considered the many different MP3 players, he said,  “Why is this one $399.00 while this one is only $99?” The clerk replied, “The more expensive one is a juke box?” The father, already unnerved replied, “Jukebox ... she wanted a MP3 player ... my daughter wants a MP3 player like all her friends have ... what is a jukebox?”  The clerk began to explain when the father interrupted suddenly, “Why is this one 20 gigamites and the other only 128 megamites ... what's the difference between a gigamite and a megamite?”  Sensing the father's impatience, the clerk went on calmly, “The jukebox is 20 gigabytes, it is a MP3 player 'and' a hard drive, while the other unit is just a MP3 player with 128 megabytes of internal memory.” The clerk continued describing the differences and the numerous features of the larger unit as the father stood there half comprehending, and before the clerk could get much further the father said, “Well, I'm not paying that much ... I don't know what this stuff is ... this is what she's getting”. He picked up the cheaper unit and stomped off. The clerk then looked at me and said, “Can I help you?” I replied, “What's a gigamite?”

I would imagine that this encounter happens quite often in stores all around the country - the “average Joe”, thrown into this ever-changing technical world full of new gadgets. However, the teenagers of today do not know of a world without computers ... their world seems to have always included: MP3 players, ipods, finger sized swappable memory, flat screen monitors, PDA/cell phones, instant messaging, blackberry messaging units, tivos, xboxes, play stations and much more.  I am fortunate or maybe unfortunate enough to remember the more barbaric computers of the past ... the Texas Instruments and Tandys, the 286 and innovative 386-DX40's, all of which are now considered “dinosaurs”.  The day will soon come when even our current crop of computers and electronic gems seem prehistoric.  The name of the game it seems, is to constantly upgrade, that is what the marketing machine would like us to do.  Never mind that you just bought the latest 2.4 gigahertz computer system, don't you know that the 2.8 gigahertz system is just around the corner?  Your brand new system seems outdated before you can even finish the user manual.  Why is that? I find myself asking, why would I need the latest and greatest system or peripheral, isn't mine working just fine? I should probably stop reading the weekly advertisements and maybe then I won't think my system is so archaic.    

One thing that appears to be snowballing is the amount of data that I am collecting or creating on a daily basis. Software updates contain much larger file sizes for the new feature-filled packages.  Music files have proliferated due to the highly popular MP3 format (MP3 is a very compressed audio codec – the advantage can be file sizes, which are ten times or more smaller than standard wave files with comparable fidelity).  Non-linear video editing at home is becoming common, absorbing much storage space.

Maybe I need a new larger hard drive?  It's amazing how much “stuff” I have, and in this case, the “stuff” is not so “byte-sized”.  Hard drives are now approaching SUV stature. I still remember my 20 megabyte drive on my 386 machine, and now they are topping 200 gigabytes! Wow, what would I ever do with 200 gigabytes?  Of course even the most prolific of writers could never fill this amount up with text files alone, but, when you enter the world of sound, video and graphics, this large expanse is not quite as grand ... or is it?   

So let's go on a journey through some of the latest ads for hard drives, “do the math”, and figure out what my needs really are.

Ad #1

120GB (Gigabytes) 7200RPM Internal EIDE Hard Drive (standard lingo for hard drives – basically, a very large capacity, fast hard drive) – Holds an average of 5 hours of video, 45 hours of MP3, and 2000 Digital photos.   

Ad #2

80GB – Holds up to 20,000 MP3 songs, 80 hours of digital video or 80,000 digital photos.     

Ad #3:  

80GB hard drive - up to 16,000 MP3 songs.   

Which advertisement should I believe?  The marketing gurus would like me to believe I need the “biggest”, because after all, I don't want my [fill in the blank] to become “outdated” too soon. If I took their word, in each of the above ads, I wouldn't know what to believe. What is 45 hours of MP3's, is it 20,000 songs?  It is a very basic equation that doesn't even require algebra.  

So….

[ 20,000 songs (3 min per song) ] = [ 20,000 x 180 (sec) ] = [ 3,600,000 (sec) ]

Equals: 1,000 (hrs)

One thousand hours! Wait a minute here – hold the bus!  Is my math wrong?  How long are these songs they're talking about?  The limited information these ads provide is not only misleading but also incorrect.

How about looking at it from a different angle:

[ 20,000 songs / 10 (songs per CD) ]

Equals: 2000 Music CD's

Wow, do I even have 2000 CD's?  I know I have a 200 Disk carousel that is completely full and a few racks of separate CD's hanging around ... am I going to have enough time in my life to listen to 20,000 songs?  Wait, how many hours is that?  Oh ... right, that's the 1000 hours I had figured out earlier ... now what was I trying to figure out?  Let me change course - how many pictures can these hard drives really hold?  

The first ad stated, 2000 pictures on a 120GB disk (that sounds kind of low to me).  My 1.3 mega pixel camera creates file sizes between 90 to 200KB (kilobytes) for each picture, so let's say 200KB to be safe.  A couple of my friends have the newer digital cameras (the kind they are selling this week ... not last week). These new cameras are 4 mega pixel and the size of each picture taken approaches 1MB (megabyte) in the standard mode. Let's calculate for both types:

Camera #1 (1.3 megapixel)

            [ 2000 (pictures) x 200KB ] = [ 400,000KB ]

Equals: 400MB

Camera #2 (4 megapixel)

[ 2000 (pictures) x 1MB ] = [ 2,000MB ]

Equals: 2GB (Gigabyte)  

How big is this hard drive? It says it is 120GB.  Is there some newer (even better) kind of camera that I don't know about?  How about the 5 hours of digital video?  I don't know what kind of camera they are using: VHS, Hi8, Digital 8, Mini DV or DVCAM or even High Definition ... okay, maybe High Definition is next week. I'll say that they are talking about a typical mini DV camera, and I will take the 5 hour scenario.  For your information, digital video is recorded (captured) by your computer at a rate of 3.6MB per second.

[ 5 hrs ] = [ 300 min ] = [ 18,000 sec ]

Therefore

[18,000 sec x 3.6MB ] = [ 64,800MB ]

Equals: 64.8GB

Looks like we are about halfway to the ballpark!  I will assume over  9 hours of video on the 120GB drive.  The 2nd ad that mentioned 80 hours of video must have been talking about non-dv video ... maybe stick figures running across flipping notepad pages.

The marketing muscle pumps out many ads each week -  new catch phrases are spun to lure the unsuspecting (non math-applying) customer into thinking that they really need 20,000 songs of MP3, and in some cases, 80,000 if they are a real junkie. The last time I checked, napster was out of business, and they were shutting down most of the other “free” file sharing services, so how in the world am I ever going to get those 20,000 songs, let alone 80,000.

One more eye-catching ad was for a portable hard drive/jukebox called the “classic” (which sounds old ... but by saying “classic” in a “retro” kind of way, it caught my eye). The “classic” is a 10GB hard drive and Jukebox with USB port and stores up to 166 hours of CD-Quality MP3/WMA music.  Holy smokes!  That's gotta be a jackpot jukebox.  How come this 10GB hard drive, which is 1/12^th the size of the 120GB hard drive that I talked about earlier, is able to hold 121 hours (166 hours – 45 hours) more?  Is it something to do with its “retro-classic” style?  No!  I guess the saying, “don't believe everything you read”, pertains.  My guess, is the proof reader made a few mistakes - most people might never even recognize the error or even care – they're too busy looking at the shiny pictures anyway ... right?

When it comes down to it, hard drives are relatively cheap. However, if you are trying to save a buck to buy the latest MP3 player for your daughter, then what you already have may be sufficient, and now that CD burners are common place, most of your “archived” materials can be offloaded to CD (which is the cheapest medium of all), freeing up even more space for your every day “stuff”. Take a look at the chart below and you may be surprised at how much material you can store on even the smaller drives. Please remember that there are always variables and that even though these numbers are calculated, they may vary slightly with your applications.  

©2003 Joseph Beachy

Joe Beachy is a former circus radio engineer and wearer of forty three hats, who is currently residing in tinsel town.

© 2003 Aviar-DKA Ltd. All rights reserved (including authors’ and individual copyrights as indicated). No
part of this material may be reproduced, translated, transmitted, framed or stored in a retrieval system for
public or private use without the written permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder.
For permissions, contact publishers@scene4.com

.

All articles are archived on this site.
To access the Archives