Farewell to a gigabyte
Some twenty years ago, when choosing a laptop, a 40 GB hard drive seemed just gigantic. Simple smartphones now offer over 30GB of storage, and flagship iPhones have surpassed the 500GB bar.
Today you will not surprise anyone with gigabytes. The generated data is growing exponentially around the world, so you will have to move to new terms that mean even larger volumes. It's time to say goodbye to gigabytes. Meet terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and zettabytes!
On the scale of laptops and home computers, users operate in volumes no higher than a few terabytes. One terabyte in decimal is 1000 gigabytes. Next comes the petabyte , which is 1000 terabytes. Which already exceeds the data storage needs of ordinary users. But in the information technology industry, such volumes have been found for a long time. Back in 2008, Google talked about processing about 20 petabytes per day (Google today no longer discloses the amount of data processed). But if we take all the academic libraries in the United States and put their information together, then we get only up to 2 petabytes.
This is followed by exabytes , which are 1000 petabytes and zettabytes (1000 exabytes). They are already more difficult to understand, since such volumes are unlikely to be clearly expressed. But the same Cisco estimated the volume of global Internet traffic in 2016 at one zettabyte. Of course, today it is already many zettabytes.
What is three zettabytes equal to?
In March 2021, Seagate announced that the total capacity of released HDDs reached three zettabytes. Is it a lot or a little? Let's figure it out.
The zettabyte bar was reached 36 years after the company was founded. It took another four years to get to the two zettabyte level. Finally, after another two years, the capacity of all supplied hard drives from Seagate exceeded three zettabytes.
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