Amazon is good for a great many things, including buying computer equipment. So: say you need some 5 terabyte (that’s five trillion bytes) hard drives, and Amazon offers them at a good price. You order them, and can’t help but notice the box looks like it was put together by a crazed raccoon using nothing but scraps. Multiple pieces of cardboard have been hastily taped together into a vague box-like shape:
This Amazon shipping container, complete with the trademark arrow that looks sort of like a smile, arrived looking as if it had just lost a fight in a bar.If Amazon had been shipping bricks — baked clay — you would expect a robust shipping container. Since hard drives are delicate electronic equipment, and should not be subjected to static or other electrical discharge, and need to be protected against bumps and drops, you would expect hard drives to be packed with greater care than bricks.
Hah! Opening the oversized collection of scraps and tape that looked only somewhat like a box, you find 20 terabytes, or twenty trillion bytes worth of hard drive storage, filling about a tenth of the interior space. About a fifth of the space is occupied by some plastic bubble packing, which means more than half of the box is “packed” with nothing but air. Instead of securely swaddling the hard drives for their journey, Amazon shipped a box of air with hard drives bouncing around inside.
While hard drives are possibly harder than bricks, they are delicate pieces of electronics, with their own memory and computer processors. Together, these four drives — packed with almost no packing — should have been treated as instruments, but were shipped more like lumps of coal.What can you do with 20 terabytes of storage? You can store 8 million photos from an iPhone, or 100 million electronic copies of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, or 9,500 copies of the Skyfall James Bond motion picture, or —
You could store a great many useful things that should be treated with even more care than you would treat bricks.
