What To Call 1,000 Terabytes?
I recently listened to an episode of Science Friday on National Public Radio. The topic was “The Data Deluge” and featured discussion of how much data exists in the world today.
Ira Flatow and his guest Martin Hilbert noted that the amount of stored data in the world today is about 600,000,000 Terabytes. I remember hearing “gigabyte” for the first time in the 1980s. Then 10 years later, in 1997 EAR sold the first terabyte storage system for animation, audio and video storage in Arizona. At $225,000 was this a bargain? It was for it’s day!
Fast forward to 2011. The thought of multi-terabyte storage systems has become routine. But when will we move beyond terabytes to 1,000s of Terabytes? And what about the next generation of mass storage benchmarks? Below is a chart courtesy of Wikipedia.
The answer to our question “What unit of measurement is beyond terabytes?” Answer: Petabytes. And 1,000 petabytes is an exabytes. There are approximately 600 exabytes of data in the world today.
If Moore’s Law holds, we should have personal storage devices by 2030 that store exabytes the way we store terabytes today!
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