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Monday, December 13, 2010

How much is a PetaByte



The preceding infographic, provided by the online storage site Mozy, is an intense look at all the qualities of a petabyte, which is equal to one quadrillion bytes. Quite a lot of memory, right? To put things into perspective, one single petabyte is equal to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text, as the graphic notes. It’s also equal to 13.3 years of HD-TV video. So, how much are 1.5 petabytes equal to?  That’s the size of 10 billion photos on Facebook. When you start getting into 20 petabytes, you begin looking at crazy numbers, for 20 petabytes is the amount of data that Google processes on a single day. And get this, the total manufactured hardrive space in 1995 was equal to about 20 petabytes.  Ready for  a stat sure to shake you out of your boots? 50 petabytes, only 30 more than 20 obviously, is equal to the entire written collection of work by all of mankind (in all languages) since the dawn of civilization.  So, when you consider that Google processes 20 petabytes in a single day, it’s not inconceivable at all to think it will one day have records of every single text in human history. I mean, they are already processing more than 50 petabytes of data in a given week.
Since this graphic was created by Mozy, you might be wondering how many petabytes Mozy has stored, and the answer to that question is roughly 15 petabytes.  The graphic contains many intriguing facts, such as the fact that that worldwide datacenters now annually consume as much energy as Sweden. Hardrives are getting larger and larger, but they remain affordable because the price of them continues to go down. In 2007, Hitachi announced the world’s first terabyte hard drive which holds 1000 Gigabytes.  One company, Colossal storage, predicts that it will have a 1.2 petabyte hard drive on the market in the next 2-5 years.

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