Amazon is shutting down their Drive service. “What Drive service?” you may ask? So did I. It’s a cloud drive like Dropbox or Google Drive, and I’d completely forgotten about it until I read that headline.

According to the FAQ, it was being used by apps for photo and video storage (I assume on Fire tablets) and those have all been moved to Amazon Photos (which I’ve definitely never used).

But something jogged my memory…not just of when Google moved all their Google Plus photo features over to Google Photos, but something else involving music.

So I looked. And it turns out I actually have some files on there after all:

Two folders.

One was “Archived Music”, all albums from 2011 that I’d imported from my CD collection. I’m not sure, but I think the service might have been integrated with Amazon’s online music player way back when, and when they disconnected them, I didn’t have anything else I wanted to use it for.

The other was “My Send To Kindle Docs,” and it was full of ebooks and PDFs from 2015-2016, most of which I recognize from Humble Bundles.

I guess I should look through and see if there’s anything I don’t have a local copy of anymore. That I want to keep, anyway.

A few months ago, I saw a 500-gigabyte hard drive at Fry’s. That’s when I realized that terabyte* drives were not far away.

Oh, sure, you’ve been able to put together multi-terabytes of storage using RAID arrays and clusters, but we’re talking something the average consumer will be able to walk into a store and buy. Something that the slightly-above-average consumer will be able to put in his computer with just a screwdriver and a cable.

It won’t be long. CNET reports that Hitachi anticipates a 1-TB drive by the end of the year.

Naturally, anyone who installs one of these will probably fill it up within a week.

(via Slashdot)

Edit: Something just occurred to me. In light of Mezzoblue’s recent article on naming drives, I’ve come up with the perfect name for my first terabyte drive: Ivan.

*Either 1,000 gigabytes or 1,024 gigabytes, depending on which definition you’re using. Is there a consensus yet?