A Few Numbers

All the software you need - in your pocket

I have an AppsDrive plugged into my PC as I write this. It’s a MP3 model. Here are a few facts:

4,000,000 bytes on my MP3 player, that’s 4 Gigabytes.

But how big is that? Large numbers often just bewilder us. So let's try one way of think about it. A floppy disk (remember those?) has a capacity of 1,457,664 bytes or 1.39 Megabytes (remember a Gigabyte is 1000 Megabytes).

There are roughly a maximum of 700 Megabytes on a CD and about 4.7 Gigabytes (4,700 Megabytes) on a DVD.

Installed on this AppsDrive I have:

• Our full applications suite, with Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird

• One of our backup software options to synchronize the player with my PC

• 143 tracks of music (15 hours 22 minutes 28 seconds long)

• Photographs of my daughter with her favourite London Irish rugby players and several of her riding her horse.

• Roboform for all my Internet passwords

• Free Commander, which I find a much better file manager than Windows Explorer

• PuTTY for SSH access, as I never know when I'll have to work on our web server

• A number of smaller utilities and some software I have written myself.

and it still has 1,480,952,320 bytes of free space - that's the equivalent of about 1 thousand floppies!

Which is a lot more than in this image

Flash drives are really quite remarkable.

If you look at, say Dabs, a box of 10 floppies is £4.55 plus VAT, so 1,000 would cost would cost £455 VAT! Our Mp3 Player is one tenth of that.

Not a fair comparison you say, well, Dabs cheapest 4 Gigabyte USB drive is over £8 and an equivalent 16 Gigabyte drive to our 16Gb AppsDrive is over £40 (they do cheaper ones, but they aren't as fast), so that still makes even the AppsDrive MP3 an attractive option.

Still thinking about it?

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