As the digital universe continues to expand with frightening speed, how you store and manage information are key issues facing everyone from gamers to small businesses.
Even as the information age expands, users are becoming more mobile explorers, stretching their equipment to physical extremes with demands on size, portability and operation in environments once thought impossible for PC use.
Seagate Technology, a leader in the competitive world of design and manufacturing of hard disk drives, recently announced some of its own innovations to Hong Kong users for harnessing and storing the vast contents of this universe.
A recent white paper by IT researcher IDC and released by information infrastructure expert EMC gives an awesome peek into the future.
IDC found the digital universe contained 161 billion gigabytes (161 exabytes) last year. This, it estimated, equalled about 3 million times the information in all books - or the equivalent of 12 stacks of books each extending from the Earth to the Sun. IDC projected this universe would increase six-fold between this year and 2010.
'The incredible growth and sheer amount of the different types of information being generated from so many different places represents more than just a worldwide information explosion of unprecedented scale,' John Gantz, chief research officer and senior vice-president of IDC, said of the study. 'It represents an entire shift in how information has moved from analogue form, where it was finite, to digital form, where it is infinite.
