Inside IT Storage

I remember thinking fondly as a teenager about how my new computer with its 500 Megabyte drive would store everything I could ever need. And of course I’ve heard similar stories from people older than me thinking that way about their revolutionary 5 Megabyte drives. And now we have 2 Terabytes of information available to us from a single 3.5-inch drive. Amazing truly, but sometimes now days it’s easy for us to think: Ho hum. So what’s next?

Less than a decade ago, Seagate's Barracuda 180 model stored what was considered massive: 180 Gigabytes of information, but requiring 12 platters! Now Seagate drives can store up to 2 Terabytes using only four platters.

Storage as a whole has simply grown to become so large, inexpensive, and ubiquitous, that it’s easy to take for granted just how much of it we consume. And there certainly doesn’t seem to be any slowing of demand. IDC estimated that 988 Exabytes of digital information is produced every year. Looking at that number can seem difficult or meaningless to grasp, unless we try to visualize and put into perspective just how much storage that truly is.

So let’s have some fun and look at the bits and bytes and see how the information stacks up, with some of the information here sourced from whatsabyte.com.

Bit: The smallest unit of information a computer can use. A digital “yes” or “no”
Byte: (8-bits)
1 byte: a single typed character
10 bytes: a single word
Kilobyte: (1000 bytes)
1 Kilobyte: a small paragraph of information
100 Kilobytes: a low-resolution photograph
Megabyte: (1000 kilobytes)
1 Megabyte: a short novel
5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare or 30 seconds of TV-quality video
10 Megabytes: One minute of high-fidelity sound
100 Megabytes: Two volumes of encyclopedias
700 Megabytes: One CD-ROM
Gigabyte (1000 Megabytes)
1 Gigabyte: a TV-quality movie
4.7 Gigabytes: A single DVD
100 Gigabytes: A floor of academic journals
Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes)
1 Terabyte: 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images or about 300 hours of good quality video
10 Terabytes: The entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress
Petabyte (1000 Terabytes)
1 Petabyte: 20 million 4-door filing cabinets full of text or about 500 billion printed pages
2 Petabytes: The content of all US academic research libraries
Exabyte (1000 Petabytes)
1 Exabyte: 1 billion Gigabytes of information
5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings
988 Exabytes: Almost one Zettabyte!

The list goes on with Zettabytes, Yottabytes, Brontobytes, and Geopbytes each growing by multiples of 1000. It is difficult to visually think about just how massive these additional storage capacities are. But the simple fact that these terms exist means that someone is certainly thinking about the need of our future storage consumption and that we’ll someday get there.

And who knows, perhaps a Yottabyte will become a commonplace capacity sooner than we think, as we move there 988 Exabytes at a time annually. Nevermind the fact that, according to Whatsabyte.com, it would take 11 trillion years to download a single Yottabyte-sized file using a broadband connection today. We will just have to hope that by the time we need that amount of capacity individually, we’ll have the broadband puzzle figured out too.