3.6 zettabytes!

[evilfantasy]

Full story: Americans consumed 3,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of info at home last year

Yes, that’s right: 3.6 zettabytes!

A report entitled “How Much Information” by the University of California in San Diego, released today, said the average person in the U.S. consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. That’s just at home.

[Salmon Trout]

Americans consumed 3,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of info at home last year

Is this counting digital delivery of TV and digitized phone traffic, do you suppose?

[Helpmeh]

Well there are:
Bytes
Kilobytes
Megabytes
Gigabytes
Petabytes
Zetabytes
???
Profit?

So that's a lot of data. But think about how big a hd movie is on a digital network?

[BC_Programmer]

Well there are:
Bytes
Kilobytes
Megabytes
Gigabytes
Petabytes
Zetabytes

Profit?

So that's a lot of data. But think about how big a hd movie is on a digital network?

err

the > 1 metric prefixes are Kilo,Mega,Giga,Tera,Exa,Peta,Zetta,Yotta

[evilfantasy]

There are bits and bytes.

http://www.gwebtools.com/bit-calculator
Storage (Kilo = 1024 bits)   Bit   8388608

Byte   1048576
Kilobit   8192
Kilobyte   1024
Megabit   8
Megabyte   1
Gigabit   0.0078125
Gigabyte   0.0009765625
Terabit   7.62939453125E-06
Terabyte   9.5367431640625E-07
Petabit   7.4505805969238E-09
Petabyte   9.3132257461548E-10
Exabit   7.2759576141834E-12
Exabyte   9.0949470177293E-13
Zettabit   7.105427357601E-15
Zettabyte   8.8817841970013E-16
Yottabit   6.9388939039072E-18
Yottabyte   8.673617379884E-19


For our big brained members. RedCrab The Calculator - http://www.redchillicrab.com

[Helpmeh]

Jesus christ?! Imagine zottabyte hard drives. They'd have to be sold-state or the read-write would be terrible. 

[BC_Programmer]

Jesus christ?! Imagine zottabyte hard drives. They'd have to be sold-state or the read-write would be terrible. 

Why?

heh, that's two in a row.

But consider this: the IBM-PC XT's 10MB hard drive had a seek time of over 85ms and a sustained transfer rate of 100kbps; and in 1982 a hard drive and controller could often run up to 1000 dollars. Today we have  1TB hard drives with a access time of around 15ms and a sustained transfer rate of over 50mb/s, for around 150-200$.

[Helpmeh]

Hey, I'm only 14. I still have lots to learn. Anyway, I was under the impression that the larger the space on the disk, the slower read-write speeds.

[BC_Programmer]

Hey, I'm only 14. I still have lots to learn. Anyway, I was under the impression that the larger the space on the disk, the slower read-write speeds.

not necessarily, Mostly, because the tech changes behind them. For example; early hard drives used a stepper motor head actuator that moved the head straight across the platter radially- this made it easier to calculate exactly where on the disk the head was. later, and still in use, the Voice-Coil actuator that rotated the heads across the platter; this required more calculation to determine where the head was, but is both more reliable and faster then the linear actuator.
The Stepper Motor was extremely unreliable; they were temperature and pressure sensitive and required the disk to be periodically reformatted or things would get honky.



 

[patio]

I remember paying a Buck a Mg. for storage.....a 720 Mg HDD cost $720.00...
Now it's less than a Buck a Gig...

[Helpmeh]

Mg? Do you mean MB?

[Geek-9pm]

Hey, I'm only 14. I still have lots to learn. Anyway, I was under the impression that the larger the space on the disk, the slower read-write speeds.

No, it's the other way. Read- Write speeds are given as an average for random seeks. Not for the time it takes to read and write the whole disk. A HDD is considered to be a virtual random access device. That is because the head can skip over tracks and find the right sector. It does not have to read each track to find its way. Internally it has a map of the layout of the disk and the logic knows how far to step the head to find a specific sector.

But, more data per track means it can take longer to find a sector if you only have a single head. So Multiple platter drives and multiple heads help improve this.

We are not yet finished with hard drive technology. There is still more to come. What they want next is a solid state head that is much smaller that present designs and can read several tracks at the same time. This will improve transfer rate and seek time.

Petabyte  is maybe on the horizon.

[Salmon Trout]

Hey, I'm only 14.

Really? As old as that?

[patio]

Mg? Do you mean MB?

Of course...

[kpac]

Really? As old as that?

Hehe this reminds me of something.

[quaxo]

My friend's shop across town has a platter from an old hard disk mounted on his wall from the early 1960s. It measures about 40" across and has a capacity of about 3.75MB or so. He told me the name of the computer it came from, but I don't recall at the moment.

The first 1 gigabyte drive was introduced sometime around 1980, it was the size of a refrigerator, and weighed over 500 lbs. Considering you can purchase drives now that hold 1,000 times that, measure less than 3.5", and weigh only a few pounds, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 10 years we go beyond petabytes and exabytes.

[Helpmeh]

I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 10 years we go beyond petabytes and exabytes.

And at the size of small coins.

[quaxo]

And at the size of small coins.

No doubt.

Oh, I did finally find out what that platter he has is from. It came from a Bryant Computer 4240, c. 1961.

[Geek-9pm]

And at the size of small coins.

And misspeaking of coins, please make no more references...
 to what comes after trillion.
...some Congressmen might read this!