Hard drives, music and mortality

I'm not one to be spooked by technology but among my geeky friends the one thing we can still get nostalgic about is hard drives.

For instance: I remember my first hard drive. It was twenty megabytes and that was a large amount of space, at least double what most of my friends had at the time. It was huge and slow and loud and expensive.

Today I saw this external 750GB hard drive (7200RPM + 16MB cache!) on sale for $159.97 CAD.

Huge and cheap, amazing, etc, etc. The kicker hits me when I read: "This Drive Holds: 660 days of around-the-clock MP3 audio". Man. Some sketchy perspective math:

• 660 days around-the-clock is 1.8 years of non-stop music, never repeating a single song.
• That's 15,840 hours.
• That's 990 days or 2.7 years of non-repeating music if we adjust for waking hours.
• 28 of these hard drives full of music would play for 75 years, the average American male's life-span. Again never repeating a song.
• 28 drives (18,627,840 hours of music storage) would cost only $4,464 CAD.
• Digital downloads to fill those drives would cost roughly 370 million dollars.

I wonder how many hours of recorded music are out there. The iTunes Music Store has only 6 million songs in its catalog which would do you for the first 34 years I guess.