In early 2002, I recall a conversation with my friend Alden Hart, now CTO of The Adrenaline Group, about what he referred to as the “personal terabyte”.  We wondered when the price of disk would be cheap enough that home users would have a TB of disk in their homes.  Well, we’re clearly there. 

I just installed the HP MediaSmart Server EX470, the 500 GB unit.  I immediately added a 1 TB Western Digital drive, bringing the unit’s capacity to 1.5 TB thereabouts (the server actually shows 1.3 GB).  The total price of the unit was about $800.  And I have 2 open bays for another couple of terabytes should I need them.

Excluding the server for the moment, I paid $260 for the 1TB drive, which means that we’re into the $0.26/GB range, something that Alden and I only imagined 6 years ago.  Storage has become dirt cheap over the years and the fact that HP and Microsoft are pitching 1/2 to 1 TB units to home users is an amazing step in a very short amount of time. 

Alden, we haven’t chatted in a long time — but here’s to ya.

I’m pretty enamored with Pandora.  This site allows you to build an internet radio channel based on songs and artists that you like.  Backing this is a database called the Music Genome Project, which should obsolete the “genre” tag on your MP3 files, which lack the consistency and taxonomy to be really useful.  Instead, the Music Genome Project classifies each song and artist based on the vocal style, tempo, key, etc. and looks for music that matches those values.  I think that Pandora could likely become the next CDDB, with music players leveraging this database (written into MP3 metadata) to allow me to select a song on my Zune and then have it play a list of other songs like that one.

Here’s a sample station seeded from a single song.  I like this song for stretching after I exercise and found that Pandora did a pretty good job of lining up similar songs.