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?
