Why? Because, consumer hard drives have officially broken the barrier. Behold, the first terabyte hard drive. It's the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 (who names these things? I keep wanting to call it the Hitachi Deathstar, myself.). Regardless, if you are so inclined, you can completely geek out about it and read the review on extremetech.com (written by people who geek out for a living).

I'm more interested in the cultural significance of being able to buy a full terabyte of storage for a mere $399. Does that sound like a lot of money? Think of it this way. That's one trillion bytes of information. I tried to calculate the cost of each byte and there were so many zeroes on the right side of the decimal point, I gave up. Let me put it this way, a terabyte equals 1000 gigabytes and that comes out to 39 cents a gigabyte. I paid a lot more than that 10 years ago for my 1 gig hard drive.

More perspective: go back to 1976 and the first Cray-1 supercomputer. A supercomputer, folks! It had an 8 megabyte hard drive. This is one trillion bytes (or one billion megabytes).

Even more perspective: one terabyte of information equals 50,000 trees worth of information on paper.

This is the reason we live in the information age. We have room to store it, organize it, manipulate it and retrieve it at will. No where will you find a more vivid benchmark showing the quantum leap we've taken technologically in just one generation.

What does all this cheap and vast data storage mean to smaller organizations? It's made you bigger than you are. It's leveled the playing field and enabled you to access business tools and richer knowledge that would have been completely out of your reach back as recently as the days of disco. It's why so many smaller businesses don't stay small for long.

Just a byte of information to ponder. One among a trillion. Have a great weekend!