Computer Storage

I am gearing up mentally to tackle setting up another Linux computer. Just like anything else in modern life, there are a number of hoops you have to go through, which makes me wonder is it really any more difficult than dealing with a medical insurance claim?

One of the first obstacles you have to surmount is partitioning the hard disk. Linux wants to divide the disk into two or three separate sections. One is for the the space you and the operating system will share, one is for swap space and another is because disks these days are friggin' huge, so we're just going to chop off the back 40 in case we take on some durn fool project that wants a bunch of dedicated space. Probably not going to happen, but whatever.

How do you explain this to someone who isn't familiar with the intricacies of modern computer systems? How about pages? Computer hard drives are typically divided into pages, much like the land for a city is divided into lots. Each page holds 4K (4096) bytes, which is roughly enough for one page of text in a book. A disk with a capacity of one terabyte (one trillion bytes) could hold 250 million computer pages, each of which could hold one page of a book. If a typical book has 250 pages, your one terabyte disk could hold one million books.

Pictures are another story. A printed picture may have a resolution of 1,000 lines per in inch. To accurately record one square inch of such an image digitally would require 1,000,000 (one million) pixels. Each pixel requires at least 3 bytes of data, so an 8 by 10 glossy would require 240 million bytes of data. To store that image on a computer disk would require 60,000 pages. Our one terabyte disk would be able to hold 16 million images. If we compiled these pages into books, at 250 pictures per book, we would have 64,000 books.

If a book is one inch thick, and your bookshelves each have six shelves and each shelf is three feet long then each bookcase could hold 216 books so we would need about one million bookcases to hold our 250 million books. You are going to need like 200 buildings each 10 stories tall.