Space on the Tray

I have to say that if you feel the need to install this little application on your PC, then you probably need a larger hard disc drive. Tray DisK Free sits in the System Tray – next to the Windows clock — and it does just one thing, it displays the amount of free space left on your disc drive. If you hover your mouse over the icon there’s a more detailed analysis. Nominally it’s set for your main drive (usually C:) but it can be set to monitor any drive on your PC. The menu option lets you change how frequently the program checks the drive, and if you want to have a fiddle with some command line switches, you can change the display and text colour.

Hitachi Hard Drive with Half a Brain

I am so old that I can remember when PC’s boasted having one kilobyte (1kb) of storage and I can still recall placing a special order, and waiting weeks for 1Mb hard disc drive, which I was convinced that I could never fill in my lifetime… So it is with a world-weary shrug that I learn than Hitachi is planning to market a 5 terabyte hard drive, probably within the next 18 months.

What makes this particularly interesting, not to say a bit spooky, is that Hitachi’s Dr Yoshihiro Shiroishi reckons that just two of them will be need to match the storage capacity of the human brain, which he estimates around 10Gb. Frankly I find that hard to believe; a lifetime of memories in a mere 10Tb, when a 2–hour movie swallows up 5 gigabytes? There must be some pretty impressive compression involved… Read more