The techheads at Wired recently declared we’re in the “Petabyte Age,” in which massive quantities of computer storage can fundamentally change scientific research. Astoundingly, for just a couple hundred dollars, you yourself can own a terabyte of storage — just one notch below (a thousandth, in other words) the earth-shattering petabyte. (Just in case you aren’t good with the numbers, the terabyte holds 1 trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes.) For a mere $220, for instance, Maxtor’s OneTouch 4 Plus can be yours, resplendent in brushed metal case and boasting a quiet operation that belies the muscular operations within. Just for your edification regarding the heft of a terabyte, entries on Wikipedia say that all of Walmart’s data is stored on 500 terabytes of data, and YouTube holds more than 600 terabytes of video. The Maxtor is compatible with both Mac and PC, the OneTouch naturally comes with backup software that stores duplicate copies of everything on your computer without your having to worry about it; it also can encrypt all that data for you, lest prying eyes want to snoop through personal records. Less common is its ability to sync data between multiple computers, eliminating the frustration that sometimes arrives when you’re in the middle of a project and realize you left an important phone number on your laptop at home. But backups and data-syncs are like laundry and dishwashing: Happily, having a terabyte at your disposal means all the chores can be done by one little corner of the hard drive while vast swaths of disk space are available for the good stuff: 1 TB, after all, is enough room to store a thousand hours of digital video (depending how it’s compressed) or nearly two years of continuous music. By the time you’re tired of all those songs, you’ll probably be able to afford a petabyte, which would hold enough music for the next two millennia.