Although Bill D apologized in his opening post for this thread about mixing the "disparate" concepts of time and space, quite obviously the majority of comments thus far have quite nicely tied the two together.

There's no problem for most of us with knowing what time it is. The problem is being in the right PLACE, at the right TIME, so it really is the combination of the two that's important.

It's worth noting that a few people who've felt the need to have one of Bill D's Terabyte Drives have found them to be somewhat like the spouse/partner with an inadequate sense of "timing." There can be a lot of "stuff" on such large drives, but getting the "stuff" to the right place at the right time begins to be a problem.

The fastest internet connections commonly available may advertise 10 to 40 Mbps transmission rates, but seldom deliver more than a fraction of that. Even good "home grade" LAN connections, 10/100BaseT or USB2 don't brag about much over 100 Mbps rates, and commonly deliver a tenth of that by the time the message negotiation gets poked into the conversation.

With 1 TeraBYTE of storage (marked down 10% for overhead) and a real I/O speed of even 100 Mbit/sec (~6 MBYTE/sec - maybe), it looks like it would take a couple of months to move a drive full of "stuff," at actual speeds attainable. That's not much problem when you're browsing around saving "stuff," but how about when the drive starts making funny noises and you need to get it (quickly?) to another storage space.

Any of our friends who actually get one of these monsters can obviously fill ALL THE TIME THEY HAVE while waiting for their "other person," doing backups - - - of all that "stuff." If there's any "wasted time" left over, they can try to figure out how to keep track of which backup has the "stuff" they might need in a hurry, or even just "where the $#!@#$ is it" on that big drive.

The obvious solution for the problem of the HD that's so wonderful it's unusable is - - - buy at least two, and RAID/Mirror them so they back up each other.

Perhaps the problem of the friend who's too complex for our plans, predictions, and scheduling is to have another friend we can call up and pass the time with while we wait. ... and wait ... and ...

(#@$*#! friend's not home where (s)he's supposed to be ....)

John