When I started into the world of computing at university, 200-300 MB hard drives were the norm for PC’s. My own first PC had what was then thought a sizable 1.6 GB disk and things have increased in size since then. I now have access to several hundred gigabytes of storage at home and we are now seeing 1TB offerings for the PC market.

Terabyte storage has been the preserve of the server market but given the disk sizes that are available now, even larger units are needed to describe the sizes of data volumes, ones that I haven’t seen before. So here goes:

* Binary measurements are used by operating systems like Windows while decimal ones are used by hard drive manufacturers

 I know that the above strays into the realms of esoterica but, with the way that things have been going, we may be talking about petabytes before very long. As it so happens, HP recently mentioned zettabytes when talking about its range of UNIX servers and I needed to go looking up what it meant…

Having had my main PC’s case hot to the touch last summer, I was wondering what was causing it. Components like CPU’s and graphics cards would need to generate a lot of heat to manage that. However, my main suspects are the hard drives in the machine: they do run hot after all and sit in a drive cradle connected directly to the case framework. As it happens, I was in Manchester’s branch of PC World yesterday and spotted Akasa hard drive coolers in stock for just £7.99 each. These dualfan units screw onto the base of your hard drive and their power connector can couple between a PATA power socket and a PSU power cable so that they can draw the power that they need without adding to case clutter. I bought two of the things and installed them; I’ll now see how they get on.