We're hitting a point where commodity hard drives are making the leap out of one SI power-of-three band and into the next power-of-three band, from GB to TB. I noticed this when I ordered a new hard drive last week for the new desktop (sadly, 250GB is only enough for about three months of building virtual servers for writing and testing SQL Server CTPs...). I ended up buying a 750GB drive, but noticed a spate of 1TB drives available, and reasonably priced.
Scientists get cool stuff named after them all the time. If you discover an asteroid, for example, it gets named after you. That's pretty cool. Similarly, mathematicians and statisticians get Laws named after them for identifying some interesting factoid or quirk of applied numbers. Also cool.
I could find no reference to this "shift" after several minutes of exhaustive searching online. If I'm first to label this "shift" - and I doubt I am - I have no idea what to call it and am therefore open to suggestions. Leonardian Shift sounds pretentious. Some obvious alternatives are descriptive in nature: the Geek Shift and Redneck Shift leap to mind.
I'm also unclear about how to define it. My first thought hinged on the fact that commodity hard drives and RAM are once again in different SI bands, and defining the shift as the point where commodity hard drives and RAM either "sync up" in SI bands or one or the other makes a leap into the next band. That sounds hard to keep up with, but it's also some insight into how my wee little brain works with this sort of minutiae...
One thought about the LS (the abbreviation doesn't seem as pretentious) defined this way - this may be the last time the off-the-shelf RAM and hard drives find themselves in the same SI band. Some market research is in order here, but I would wager current trends in hard drive capacity growth are outstripping the same in RAM. Also, commodity RAM is in the single- to (barely-) double-digits at this point in time while hard drives are cracking into the TB range.
Perhaps the ratio between RAM and hard drive capacities - the LSR - could prove useful. These things are difficult to predict. For example, an unscientific poll conducted solely at NewEgg.com (the good people who sold me the 750GB hard drive) reveals the current commercially-available maximum capacity for DIMM is 2GB and the same for hard drives is 1TB. I could calculate the LSR either way really, but since it's my call and I'm a guy and like larger numbers for reasons I will not explore in this blog post, I'll put the larger number in the numerator and state that as of today, 21 Feb 2008, the LSR = 500.
Do I need a unit of measure for that? I shouldn't - it's a ratio.
Wow, that felt good! Now I know why those scientists spend all that time looking for asteroids and comets.
We could, of course, have some fun with this. My loyal readers (both of you) could start mentioning the LSR in your writing - with or without explanation. That would be almost as much fun as when we claimed was named after David Silverlight!
We'll know we've succeeded when Joe Kernen mentions "the LSR" in an interview with the CEO of a hard drive or RAM manufacturer. Have at it...
:{> Andy