A Petabyte is How Much?
My article Yottabyte gave readers an idea of the size of hard drives to come…but Tommy from class gave a great example of just how much space is being used in a Petabyte.
Just several years ago we had 1.44 mb (megabyte) floppy drives. Who could possibly use a thousand of these? Well in no time we had a gigabyte. Then a thousand gigabytes or a Terabyte. So if we had a thousand Terabytes, we would have a Petabyte. Now how big is that?
A Petabyte would be approximately 204, 800,000 pictures (images at 5 mb each). IF you opened them up with a viewer and viewed them for one second each, it would be 204, 800,000 seconds. Since there are 3,600 seconds in an hour and which would also mean there is 31, 536,000 seconds in a year. Your final viewing time would be 6.49 years. Now that means you can’t sleep or eat. That is viewing pictures 24/7 – 365 for six and a half years.
By the way the internet was estimated at being approximately 500 Exabytes as of May of 2009. An Exabyte is 1024 Petabytes. Now do the math.
Thanks Tommy!
P.S. One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video – just for the record.
