Mozy, an unlimited backup provider, just pulled together an interesting graphic to illustrate just how big a Petabyte is. In total Mozy store 15 Petabytes, and they’ve calculated that one Petabyte equals:
- 13.3 years of HD content
- Nearly all of the photos on facebook (1.5PB in total)
- How much data google processes in just under an hour
I’ve pasted the Mozy graphic at the end of the post with There’s a hugh graphic at the end of the post will all the cool stats Mozy have pulled together.
The post made me wonder, how long will it be before users need Petabyte Hard Drives? Bill Gates once (although he now denies it!) that the average computer wouldn’t need more than 64KB of ram, and he’s a pretty clued up guy. My total data storage has gone from:
- 1994 My first PC: 200MB HDD 1MB Ram
- 1997 2nd PC: 8GB HDD ?? Ram (can’t remember)
- 2001 3rd PC: 512MB 40GB HDD
- 2005 4th PC: 2GB RAM 2x250GB HDD
- 2008 Current PC: 4GB RAM
Now, I haven’t added the storage for my current PC because I now store all my files on a Windows Home Server, which currently has around 6.5TB of storage:
In my server are 8 HDDs in total. I added the eighth just last week, a 1.5TB drive because my other 1.5TB drive was throwing up errors and looked like it was going to fail. So I purchased another drive to ensure I had enough space to copy all my files in case it died. That’s makes my real storage level around 5TB.,
I’m not sure if I’m going to continue increasing my storage at a rate of around 5-10x every couple of years. I really think that going forwards I will start moving my files to the Cloud; I’m already storing 250GB of my documents, photos and music with Sugarsync who offer a min 2GB of storage for free.
Do you think user’s will continue requiring bigger HDDs, or do you think going forwards users will store their data in the cloud?
I had to laugh
When I bought my first computer, you could by a hard drive. A 5Kb (yes that is a K) Winchester drive was around $5000!
It is interesting to see where we have come.
I had to laugh
When I bought my first computer, you could by a hard drive. A 5Kb (yes that is a K) Winchester drive was around $5000!
It is interesting to see where we have come.
If the combined written works of humanity are only 50 PB, then what the heck will we fill up our hard drives with when we get that big?
Since written works aren’t the only thing out there and other things can take up much more space (say HD movies and software), it really isn’t relevant. As more and more software comes out to help us get our creativity onto the computer, storage demand is going to go sky high.
Also remember that right now what you use in a computer only deals with sight and sound. But what about when the other three senses are affected by the computer when such peripherals come out? And what about when they become HD integrated? Imagine a movie or game that was HD in all 5 senses. Don’t you think that it would take up more than traditional systems?
If the combined written works of humanity are only 50 PB, then what the heck will we fill up our hard drives with when we get that big?
Since written works aren’t the only thing out there and other things can take up much more space (say HD movies and software), it really isn’t relevant. As more and more software comes out to help us get our creativity onto the computer, storage demand is going to go sky high.
Also remember that right now what you use in a computer only deals with sight and sound. But what about when the other three senses are affected by the computer when such peripherals come out? And what about when they become HD integrated? Imagine a movie or game that was HD in all 5 senses. Don’t you think that it would take up more than traditional systems?
That quote has often been attributed to Bill Gates.. but is entirely fabricated. He denies it because he never said it.
That makes sense. Bill Gates never really seemed the type to limit himself, and if RAM never expanded, how could he make more software on such a limited market? So who came up with the phrase?
That quote has often been attributed to Bill Gates.. but is entirely fabricated. He denies it because he never said it.
That makes sense. Bill Gates never really seemed the type to limit himself, and if RAM never expanded, how could he make more software on such a limited market? So who came up with the phrase?
yeah, now a gigabyte is about $.10, being that most Terabyte drives are around $100
yeah, now a gigabyte is about $.10, being that most Terabyte drives are around $100
I’ve been reading your posts for the last couple of hours, and it all has been very informative and nicely written. I did want to allow you understand that for some reason this post doesn’t seem to work in Internet Explorer. On a side note, I was wondering if you desired to swap blogroll links? I hope to hear from you soon!
As high quality music and HD continues to evolve, and editing becomes easier, i think there will be a need for petabyte HD’s sooner than we think