Can You Use a TB?

Posted on September 19, 2008

We’ve just got to get used to talking about TB’s instead of GB’s. We’ve pretty much quit talking about MB’s already except for individual files like MP3s, images, etc. So it appears we’re getting pretty close to making the next transition - the one where you just can’t find a hard drive less than a terabyte in size anymore.

The rapid advance in current technology which continues pushing the size envelope makes the age of SSD drives as the standard seem a little farther away as they have a long way to go to catch up to the TB size.

Now that we’re talking about the new TB standard, why not carry those thoughts to storage online as well?

There is now one web application that has stepped forward to offer an unbelievable one terabyte (that’s 1,024 gigabytes, if you didn’t know) of media online for free. Oosah is the name of this benefactor and in addition to hosting videos, photos, and music you upload directly to the site, Oosah also allows you to integrate your account with Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, and YouTube.

Not only that, once you’ve connected the accounts, if you upload photos to Ooosah that you want to add to an image set you have in Flickr, you can actually drag and drop photos directly to your Flickr set..

The only real limitation is that 200MB per video and 9MB per audio are the maximum sizes allowed of those formats. Obviously, they don’t want you ripping and uploading a couple hundred movies nor a collection of audiobooks, which seems pretty reaosnable.

Now, I’ve shot quite a bit of video just with my digital camera that is around a gigabyte in size per file. So those video files would have to be run through a splitter and the parts uploaded.

You might wonder how they could possibly offer so much storage for free. I’m sure they are trememdously hedging their bet by buying only a small fraction of that amount in hard drives. Sure, there will be a few people who will hunt up everything they can to max out their TB, but for most users, they’ll never come close to using the space.

Think about it - 2000 MP3’s run maybe 8GB, 2000 hi-res JPG’s about the same, and let’s say you’ve got 200 of those 1GB movies I was talking about. You’ve used a little over 20% of your capacity.

So, while it’s a great offer, they’re pretty safe assuming it won’t be needed very many times.