Want to start the week by having your mind boggled?
OK – we all know that there’s lots of digital data around. We take digital photos that can be up to 10Mb for pictures, TV is recorded in people’s homes to hard disk video recorders and at the other end of the digital-size scale, lots of people are sending Tweets and posting on Facebook.
Well, one company of technology analysts have been trying to work out how big the yearly digital universe is – how much data gets stored around the world per year.
Current estimate
Their current estimate is 800,000 petabytes. OK, what’s that translate to?
We’re all familiar with a gigabyte? A gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes.
1,000 gigabytes are referred to as a terabyte.
A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes – or put another way one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) bytes.
(Strictly each of these 1,000s that we’ve referred to is 1,024, but for simplicity, let’s leave it to 1,000)
800 billion gigabytes
So the data that was created last year – 800,000 petabytes, is 800 billion gigabytes – that’s up 60% on last year.
In physical terms, the company, IDC, equate this to a stack of DVD from earth to the moon and back again!
Zettabyte!
Their estimates for this year is a further 1.2 million petabytes will be created – giving the opportunity for a new computing word to surface – a zettabyte. 1.2 million petabytes can also be referred to as 1.2 zettabytes.
IDC, reckon that by 2020 this is going to accelerate further, reaching 35 zettabytes. Using their DVD analogy, the DVD stack would reach half way to Mars.
… and relax
OK – brain explosion over. We’ve off to make a cup of tea to try and put things into perspective.
Thanks for James P for the Zetabyte -> Zettabyte tip.
Image: © IDC
