A&L Enterprises Tech Line

At the IOD conference this year the volumes of data discussed were amazing.  I’ve been thinking about how much the volumes of storage have grown in my own lifetime.  I remember my first exposures to computers – both at home and at school.  I remember my dad building a personal computer and using a tape recorder (i.e  cassette tape) to store data.  The Apple IIes at school we’re more advanced – as they had the early 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.  I remember one of my first IBM compatible (MS-DOS) PCs that I used for a while – in that it didn’t even have a hard drive initially. It had a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive that you booted from first – and then used a different disk to store data.  Getting my first hard drive was really cool – but I can’t remember how big it was – but it was likely close to 500 megabytes.

Today we’re starting to measure data not in megabytes or gigabytes – but in petabytes and zetabytes (and soon yottabytes).  For understanding here are some basic definitions:

• kilobyte  - 1024 bytes
• megabyte - 1000 kilobytes (1,024,000 bytes)
• gigabyte – 1000 megabytes (1,024,000,000 bytes)
• petabyte - 1000 gigabytes (1,024,000,000,000 bytes)
• zetabyte - 1000 petabytes (1,024,000,000,000,000 bytes)

Another way to put this in perspective is to compare these numbers to the storage objects that I’ve encountered in my lifetime.  For example,

• Remember those 3 1/2 inch disks (see picture above)?  They held 1.4  megabytes – which was a good amount in the early to mid 1990′s when I was in high school and college
• For backup I had an Iomega Zip Drive – essentially a removable hard drive.  These had a capacity of 100 megabytes - which meant a few of these disks could back up an entire hard drive at the time (which we’re probably around 500 megabytes)
• CDs typically held about 700 megabytes and we’re in most cases read only.
• DVDs can hold up to 4.7 gigabytes of data (which at the time seemed a lot).
• I have an inexpensive USB flash stick – which holds about 4 gigabytes itself (which are now less than $10)
• You can buy a 2 terabyte hard drive now at MicroCenter for $99.

•  500 2 terabyte hard drives (1000 terabytes / 2 = 500)
• 212, 766 DVDs (1000 terabytes x 1000 gigabytes / 4.7 gigabytes = 212766)
• 250,000 4 gigabyte USB sticks (1000 terabytes x 1000 gigabytes / 4 gigabytes = 250,000)
• 1,428,571 CDs (1000 terabytes x 1000 gigabytes x 1000 megabytes / 700 megabytes = 1428571)
• 10,000,000 Iomega 100 megabyte ZIP disks (1000 terabytes x 1000 gigabytes x 1000 megabytes / 100 megabytes = 10000000)
• 694,444,444 3 1/2 inch disk drives (1000 terabytes x 1000 gigabytes x 1000 megabytes / 1.44 megabytes = 694444444)