Fun Facts of Storage

Did you know that:

1 Byte = A single character

1 Kilobyte = A very short story

40 Kilobytes = An average downloaded web page

100 Kilobytes = A low resolution photograph

1 Megabyte = A small novel

20 Megabytes = A box of floppy disks

500 Megabytes = A CD-ROM

1 Gigabyte = A good collection of the works of Beethoven

100 Gigabytes = A floor of academic journals or a large ID-1 digital tape

1 Terabyte = All of the X-ray films in a large technological hospital or 50,000 trees made into paper and printed

3.2 Terabytes = The compressed capacity of the Exabyte 480 8mm Library

10 Terabytes = The printed collection of the US Library of Congress

2 Petabytes = All US academic research journals

200 Petabytes = All printed material in the world

1 Exabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

5 Exabytes = All the words ever spoken by humans

Storage Costs:

1996 2000 2004 2005
cost /Gb of disk
$500.00 $10.00 $1.00 $0.50

For a lovely progression of the cost of storage, see: http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625/winchest.html

Information originally from Exabyte's Fun Facts of Storage [updated and augmented]

  • funstuff/fun_facts.txt
  • Last modified: 2012/03/29 06:44
  • by 127.0.0.1