| How Large is a Petabyte? |
 Source:
Gizmodo.com July 8, 2009 http://gizmodo.com/5309889/how-large-is-a-petabyte
Comments:
If you"ve read my newsletter for any length of time, you know that besides
health I"m also passionate about technology in all its forms. When you look
at the breakneck speed of development of ever larger computer drives, it"s
truly Moore"s Law
in
action.
Moore"s Law, as you may remember, is a popular axiom that predicts that the
number of transistors per integrated circuit will double each year.
Two years ago we saw the introduction of the first terabyte (1,000 GB)
drive, inching us ever closer to petabyte storage, which may be as little as
another two years away.
The illustrations above are a great way to get an understanding of just how
large a petabyte really is.
Imagine a computer with a 1,000,000 GB drive!
What could you put on it?
One thing"s for sure, you certainly couldn"t fill one up with your personal
documents, photos or home movies.
*How Many Books Could You Fit on a Petabyte Drive?*
On average, one book takes up about one megabyte of space. If you read one
book a day for every day of your life for 80 years, your personal library
will amount to less than 30 gigabytes. So even if you were a voracious
reader, you"d still have 999,970 gigabytes left over at the end of your
life.
A major research library like the Library of Congress, which is said to hold
24 million volumes, would take up 1/50th of your disk space. You could
literally fit 50 Library of Congresses on your personal petabyte drive.
*You"ll Never Need to Delete a Photo Ever Again*
Other kinds of information are bulkier than text. A large high-resolution
image, for example, might take up as much as 10 megabytes.
If you were to snap 100 high-res photos documenting your life each and every
day for 80 years, you"d have used up 30 terabytes. You"d still have 970,000
gigabytes left after a lifetime of high quality photos.
What about music?
MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or less. At that rate, a
lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 80 years--would
consume 42 terabytes of disk space.
So with a lifetime of music and pictures, you will still have 928,000 GB
left on your disk.
*Or, How About 57 Years of Non-Stop Movies?!*
The one kind of content that could possibly consume a petabyte disk is
video.
In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two gigabytes per hour.
Thus a petabyte drive will hold some 500,000 hours worth of movies.
Or, if you were to film yourself all day and all night, you"d actually fill
your petabyte drive after 57 years. With a second petabyte drive, you could
record every single moment of life, in high-quality video, of the oldest
person on earth.
*Where Did You Put That Info?*
A nagging question that has yet to be fully answered is how anyone will be
able to organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 1 million
gigabytes -- unless you"re as organized as the Library of Congress, and who
is, really?
Computer file systems and the human interface to them are already creaking
under the strain of managing a few gigabytes.
We"re now starting to see the other side of the economic equation as
information itself is becoming increasingly free (or do I mean worthless?),
but metadata--the means of organizing information--is becoming priceless.
The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is profoundly
counterintuitive. Because in addition to Moore"s Law predicting storage
drives will double each year, another* *well-known corollary is Parkinson"s
Law , which says that data,
like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it.
Shortage of storage space has been a constant of human history; I"ve never
met anyone who had a hard time filling up closets or bookshelves or file
cabinets. Closets, bookshelves and file cabinets, however, do not double in
size every year.
In the end, only the human imagination will determine what we"ll end up
doing with all that extra storage space.
Dr.Mercola
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