too many words by laura lemay

it's full of bits!

Last night I plugged in a new hard disk drive to store my increasingly large collection of stuff. I’ve done this a bunch of times before, its not hard. But then when I opened up Disk Utility to format the drive something seemed…kind of strange.

hugedisk1.gif

892.6 … PB? PB? That can’t mean…petabytes?

I looked down the screen to total capacity.

hugedisk2.gif

Holy crap! Thats a lot of bytes. I had to go tell Eric.

Laura: what does it mean when you plug in a disk and it says you have 900 petabytes of free space?
Eric: either the math is wrong or you’ve just opened up a worm hole in space.

Geeky explanation: It turns out that Maxtor drives do not jumper like the Quantum drives I’ve been using. I reset the jumper correctly and I got the normal .00025 PB capacity I was looking for.