These days, electronic devices come in various storage capacities.  It’s one of the features that most people look at before making a purchase.  If you buy a new iPad, one of the things you’ll need to consider is if 16GB of storage space will be enough for all your data – such as your photos and videos.  If you’re one of those people who’s fond of snapping away at every possible moment, then 16GB probably won’t be enough.  You either go for a version with a higher storage capacity or get cloud storage for that.

But have you ever wondered what your file size really means?

A bit is a single binary digit, it can either be 0 or 1.  Eight bits make up a byte, in terms of words one byte is one character while 10 bytes is one word.  One Kilobyte is equal to 1,000 bytes.  In terms of words, 1KB is equal to one short paragraph, 2KB is equal to typewritten page, and 100KB is equal to a low resolution photo.

A megabyte is equal to 1,000 KB, so a 1MB file is equal to a short novel, 2MB a high resolution photo, 5MB is equal to the complete works of Shakespeare, 10MB is comparable to a digital chest x-ray, 100MB is like two encyclopedia volumes, and 500MB is a CD-ROM.

Seven minutes of HD TV Video is 1 Gigabyte, or 1,000 MB.  A standard DVD-R has 4.7GB, the audio set of Beethoven’s work is 20GB, and the library floor of academic journals is 100GB.

One thousand Gigabytes equates to one terabyt,e which is equivalent to 50,000 trees made into paper and printed, while the printed collection of the US Library of Congress is equal to about 10TB.

Getting dizzy with the numbers yet?  There’s more!

A thousand terabytes is equal to one petabyte, or 10 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text. Then, consider all 10 billion photos that have been posted onto Facebook, which is is equal to 1.5 PB. But that’s nothing compared to the amount of data processed by Google every day, which amounts to 20PB, and the entire written works of all of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all of its languages, which is equivalent to 50PB.

But that’s nothing compared to the entire Netflix catalogue, which dwarfs the written works of mankind with its one exabyte or 1,000 PB file size. And while we’re at it, did you know that all the words ever spoken by mankind (to date) is equal to 5EB, only five times Netflix’s existing movie catalogue.

But we can go higher still. One thousand exabyte is equal to a zettabyte, which is about 250 billion DVDs.  And finally 1,000 ZB is equal to one yottabyte or the entire World Wide Web. If you were to download the entire content of the WWW using a standard broadband connection, it would take you about 11 trillion years to do so.

A bit of history

IBM’s 5MB hard drive, circa 1956

The first ever hard drive was introduced by IBM in 1956.  It weighs about one ton and can hold up to 5MB of data.  You might be laughing at this as these days you have a USB key that can hold up to 64GB of data which weighs about as heavy as your house key.  But remember, the technology back then wasn’t as advanced as today’s, so that’s quite a feat back in the day.

The first removable hard drive was introduced by IBM in 1963, and in 1980, the first gigabyte hard drive was introduced, also by IBM.  As the years progressed, removable hard drives could hold even more data.  In 1992, HP released a 2GB hard drive, then IBM released the 16GB Deskstar in 1997. This was beaten by Hitachi, which released its 16GB GST Deskstar in 2007, and since then hard drives have evolved to serve many other functions, such as serving as mobile hotspots or powerbanks like the ADATA DashDrive Air AE800.

The Future

Are data storage capabilities are pretty impressive these days, but companies are experimenting with new ways of making hard drives more efficient. Some ideas include helium-filled drives which remove the friction and fluttering of platters as they spin at high speed, allowing more platters to be fitted into a given space.  There’s also shingled magnetic recording, or SMR, wherein the tracks of a drive overlap like shingles on a roof which allows the hard drive to have more tracks, which means more data can be stored.  And we mustn’t forget heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR hard drives, which allow data to be written more compactly by raising the temperature of the material that can be read by a magnetic field.

Western Digital is already experimenting with helium-filled drives that can hold up to 5.6TB. Next year, Seagate plans to release a hard drive built using SMR technology that can hold up to 5TB of data, and in 2020 it plans to release HAMR drives that can hold up to 20TB of data.

Brought to you by datascience@berkeley: Master of Information and Data Science

Infographic source: DataScience@Berkeley