Global Bit Bucket Overflows: More Data Created Than Can Be Stored
Wednesday, March 7, 2007 by Zoomba | Discussion: WinCustomize News
Believe it or not, there is currently more data zipping around you, over wires, the air, on discs and thumb drives, than there is actual permanent storage space to hold all of it. Thankfully, not everything is captured, and we do prune our digital archives from time to time.
IDC released a report recently detailing its estimates of how much digital content has been created. This includes photos, music, IMs, email, documents, videos, applications etc. The estimate also accounts for each file getting copied an estimated three times. The total they came up with? 161 exabytes.
To put that in perspective, 1 exabyte is 1,073,741,924 gigabytes. The average computer hard drive now holds somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 gigabytes. A single exabyte would require more than 5.3 million of those drives. 161 exabytes would require around 864 million hard drives to store.
An easier to visualize comparison would be to create twelve stacks of books. That reach from the Earth to the Sun. That's how much data we're talking about here.
Read more on what this number means, and how it was calculated at Wired.
Reply #3 Wednesday, March 7, 2007 5:03 PM
anybody got a spare HD I can borrow?
Dave
Reply #4 Wednesday, March 7, 2007 5:51 PM
Wait, wait, no that's Gigs...nevermind.
Reply #5 Wednesday, March 7, 2007 6:09 PM
WOW!!!!!!! _-_
And WOW again............Kaplunk!!
Reply #6 Wednesday, March 7, 2007 10:09 PM
Oh yeah, I stack stuff from here to the sun all the time!
(Sorry, 800+ million HDDs might be a tad easier for me to imagine than a distance I'm never ever going to have the chance to truly see/experience.)
Reply #7 Thursday, March 8, 2007 4:16 AM
No you don't! I found that it starts burning up around halfway there.
Reply #8 Thursday, March 8, 2007 8:25 AM
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1680304.htm
Reply #9 Thursday, March 8, 2007 9:41 AM
Pretty sure you wouldn't make it...stacking books all the way to the sun.....
2 reasons.....
The bugger keeps moving [it's a relativity thing, don't argue]
and
Sooner or later you'd reach a point where the darn things burned up faster than you could place them....
Reply #10 Thursday, March 8, 2007 9:48 AM
....and the third [yeah, I know] ...the darn things would just float off in all directions cos after the first few up in 'space' you'd run out of hands to hold 'em in place....
...and the fourth ...the first stack of 'em on the ground would compress/collapse under their own weight...
...oh, botheration....next analogy......
Reply #11 Thursday, March 8, 2007 11:30 AM
....and fifth, there aren't enough libraries worldwide that'd letcha borrow that many books.
Reply #12 Tuesday, March 13, 2007 12:54 PM
and sixth, i don't know if you guys need air, but it sure helps me to feel all comfy and cozy as i sit in my chair of hardness...
on another note, i don't see much point in massive flash drives anymore... my 4 gig seems to handle it all...plus it's only 55 bucks where i got it, so boo-yah! anyone here got an 8 or 16 gig? or do you use external hard drives for transport? i got me a 200 gig 3.5 drive, and a 60 gig 2.5 drive, but i rarely use those for anything more than backups...
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Reply #1 Wednesday, March 7, 2007 2:12 PM