How Much Is A Petabyte?
July 2nd, 2009 by nateWe store a lot of data here at Mozy (15+ petabytes, in fact), but how much is that really? We put together this series of stats to help you understand just how much data that really is. Enjoy!
Tags: Info, Interesting, Petabytes, Storage
July 4th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Umm…. Wow….
July 5th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Now what will happen? If everyone is making /taking pictures and puts them on internet? We all be needing much more space and energy on the www. And we all want thee best possible pictures of everything. How many pictures are taken from the Eiffel tower? They don’t differ that much, do they? But what if we all want the best pictures of animals or a peace full place somewhere in nature? We’ll be doing anything to get this picture, even if its bad for these animals or environment. At the same time we’ll be needing more and more of energy. One day we could say: “luckily we still have these pictures”
July 7th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Thanks for the information.
July 7th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I have always wondered what is higher than a Terabyte. Great compilation of facts and very informative. Thanks! Just Stumbled it!
July 8th, 2009 at 2:32 am
my brain just exploded, great presentation
July 8th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Fascinating. Is there a hi-res version available?
July 8th, 2009 at 7:53 am
If audio enthusiasts are called audiophiles, I guess storage enthusiasts should be calls pedophiles, right?
July 8th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Awesome!
I’ll take 3 wall-sized posters please!
July 8th, 2009 at 8:21 am
wait for 2012 or 2025 and 2050 this petabyte will be nothing just like 20 years ago 1 Gb
))))
July 8th, 2009 at 10:46 am
yep, more and better!
July 8th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Really cool……
July 8th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Echoing Bobby Fever – printed image out on the plotter for students to see!
July 8th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
A take on “how much is a Petabyte?” from 2003: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/10/GigaTeraPeta
July 8th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
I’d love a full res version to print for my PC shop – let me know if that’s possible to get, thanks!
July 8th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
20PB in 1993 would’ve been a better estimate for total HDD manufactured capacity
July 8th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
I’m sure HDD manufacturers do not count 1GB as 1024MB but rather 1000MB for some reason so I guess this will filter through up to a Flibblebyte as well.
July 9th, 2009 at 12:51 am
Good idea, but the semi-circles for computer usage in 2000 and 2008 are incorrect in size with the area of the outer being roughly 10 times the inner. This is not even close to the 342% figure given above.
Other than that, a great idea
July 9th, 2009 at 4:39 am
And to think that we sent men to the moon using only 64 kb
July 9th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Suppose you have molecular memory, with a few carbon and hydrogen atoms storing a single bit. It would then be possible to have a mole of bits. Avagadro’s number is about 6×10^23, so you could have 10^24 bits in a few hundred grams of material. We are reaching the limits of silicon, but going to carbon-based semiconductors is feasible. I do not think anyone is going to make a molecular-scale microprocessor any time soon, but bulk memory – because it is the same component, banged out millions of times over – may well lead the way.
At about the exabyte level we passed an interesting milestone. An exabyte is 10^12 bytes, or a bit more than the square root of Avogadro’s number. We are about half-way on a log scale: we can expect another factor of a trillion before the physics starts getting hard.
July 10th, 2009 at 7:49 am
I find this simultaneously terrific and terrifying. I hope that prople. will have the goodwill to use this awe-inspiring technology for good, and not bad. We stand at the start of a very uncertain future, and I can only pray that this does not end up destroying humankind.
July 10th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Joakim made the comment about the semi-circles being incorrect in size. I disagree. Go into any image editor and make a circle. Copy/paste it and then scale it 324%. It will be roughly 10 times larger (actually closer to 10.49 times larger) because when you are scaling a 2-dimensional object, it scales both in height and in width.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Gates will still take the same percentage he is on your current drive. Software developers will tend to be less concerned about how much space they take up as they already do…
Your dollar Coke will prolly be five
July 11th, 2009 at 5:36 am
This is wrong this way! The multiplier between MegaByte, GigaByte, TeraByte and PetaByte is not 1024 but 1000 — as of relevant IEC and ISO standards! Indeed in the Hard Disk Drive business and Telecommunications where a GigaByte was 1000 MegaBytes since (a) decade(s), etc.
This is for the elimination of the different meaning of the SI prefixes (k, M, G, T, P) in computing and the rest of life…
If you want base-2 prefixes (like in case of digital memory) then use the newer binary prefixes: ki, Mi, Gi, etc.
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
July 12th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Ensure we keep all these information simple as we can without any overhead. Future generations will love us thinking now.
July 12th, 2009 at 11:10 am
The multiplier between MegaByte, GigaByte, TeraByte and PetaByte is not 1024 but 1000 — as of relevant IEC and ISO standards! Indeed in the Hard Disk Drive business and Telecommunications where a GigaByte was 1000 MegaBytes since (a) decade(s), etc.
This is for the elimination of the different meaning of the SI prefixes (k, M, G, T, P) in computing and the rest of life…
If you want base-2 prefixes (like in case of digital memory) then use the newer binary prefixes: ki, Mi, Gi, etc.
See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
July 12th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
yea yea, area under a curve. Smarty pants.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:53 am
What/where do you backup 15+ petabyte on/to?!
July 13th, 2009 at 9:30 am
The Petabyte Age Cometh…
We’re not even the first storage blog to pick up on this–Storagezilla posted yesterday–but cloud provider Decho (formerly Mozy) has come up with a truly compelling graphic on the coming “Petabyte age” to invoke what the da…
July 13th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
One thing to remember is that not too long ago people were saying that a gigabyte was the “ultimate be-all” height of storage. That we would never need anything larger. Before that the same thing was said of the megabyte. Now we have people who are using terabyte sized drives for home businesses and personal information. Not too long from now people will be using petabyte sized storage and staring in awe at the exabyte. (The next size up from a petabyte.)
July 14th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
I had a computer in 1998. My Hard Drive was, I want to say, about 20GB. I didn’t, however, spend $4,560 on it. How do you figure it cost $228 per GB of HDD space in March of 1998?
Also, 1 Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes, not 1024.
1 Pebibyte, however, is 1028 Terabytes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte
You took at least 90% of the information on this chart straight off Wikipedia, you just missed the part where 1028 Terabytes is not a Petabyte.
July 16th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
I’m curious how much data is being backed up into the Mozy datacenter each day – and how much available bandwidth is feeding it – 10 Gbit/s? More or less?
July 16th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Hey Nostok. You’ve created a googlewhack with Flibblebyte. This is the only place where that word is mentioned across the whole 120 Tb of the InterWeb. Well done!
July 16th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
What does come after Petabyte?
July 17th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Well that’s it for space travel then. Never be able to get through all that data and the search clouds.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Very cool…I want one!
July 18th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Now for the fun part… As HDD density increases the amount of data you lose if it goes down increases by as much. How handy….
July 18th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Thanks for the information.
July 18th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Wow that’s amazing, I would think world knowledge and history would be greater than 50petabytes.
How can one even quantify something like that. Btw list your sources next time so that we can check into them, but wow..that’s an insane amount of data -especially that google is handling 20 petabytes a day
July 18th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Thank you for this didactic gif…
July 18th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
All written works of mankind
= 50 petabytes = 53 687 091 200 megabytes
Download speed of my “high-speed” cablemodem (as per speedtest.net)
6.2Mbps = 0.775 Megabytes per second
Time to download works of mankind…priceless…err, i mean…
69 273 666 065 seconds = 2 195 years = 88 Generations = LOL
now…where’d i put my reading glasses!? =D
July 18th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Hmmm, interesting. I wonder what comes after Petabyte. Probably in about 5 years, how we think about Gigabytes will be how people will think about Petabytes. It wasn’t long ago that Megabytes was the norm while a Gigabyte was something to ‘ooo and awe’ about. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that in a very near future that Petabytes will be every where. Possible, computer hard drives will come with a x-amount of Petabyte drives.
What is going to be really fascinating is to see Mozy, as usual, being way ahead in the ‘X-Byte Generation’ by at least two levels. I’m curious as to what those levels of bytes are above and beyond Petabytes
Thanks for the great read.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
who cares whether 1 GB is 1024 or 1000Mb,and who wants to measure semi-circles, We all get the Broad Picture
July 18th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Wow….euh…. Peta… OK, so that’s… euh…. Big…huh?…. Yeap, I think so.
Ok… now what…. euhmmm… how are we going to keep filling these petabits/bytes… euh… things…
Dunno…. yet…. But I guess… We will find a new unuseful unimportant unefficient way to get it all full.
Up to now we could… If we all gonna… you know… keep up the typework and euhm…. well…. some day we went to the moon. So…. some day we will have filled a number of PETABYTEs…. or…. I dunno…. Will we ever?…..
Hihi… It IS a high-technical achievement!!
Congratulations to the HDD manufacturers.
Must be pretty cool to be able to keep up with this.
I once started on a 48K Apple ][ europlus. (Still adore the thing).
Excuse me for not being able to comprehend anymore……. bits… bytes… Kb.. Mb.. Tb…………….Pb???
Wow……
July 18th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
If MS Windows keeps getting more bloated we’ll need hard drives measured in petabytes on our home PCs
July 18th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
A petabyte could also be 10,000 yapping Chihuahua’s each burning 10 calories each over 10 years
July 18th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
that’s each second
July 18th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Huh…that is a LOT of porn.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
It’s amazing!
July 19th, 2009 at 1:33 am
When I was a boy and just starting with computers at high school, we had an RML380Z with 16Kb of RAM and you could get an extra 8 from the graphics if you poked the memory. On day 1 I was given a 5 1/4 inch disk that could hold up to 720Kb or data and was told “you will NEVER fill this up”. If only we could have seen 25 years into the future then… I would have gone to joinery and given computing up on the spot.
July 19th, 2009 at 3:42 am
I wonder….how long does it take to backup a petabyte? So lets say users on Mozy consumed 15 petabyte as of now, how long does it take to backup these? Grandfather->Father->system?
July 19th, 2009 at 5:14 am
Scientists have determined that this information became obsolete 1.2 minutes after you read it. We’re now shooting for YOTTABYTES!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte
July 19th, 2009 at 5:49 am
Nice presentation. Looks like a couple of the quotes came form my site; WhatsAByte.com. That is fine that you used them but if anybody needs a better understanding of all of the byte terms and why the hard drive sizes differ from what you see in the Windows drive management, check out http://www.whatsabyte.com
July 20th, 2009 at 12:03 am
What a waste of energy… All of humankind’s written work will be stored, but humans will have wrecked the planet, and themselves, so there will be no one to read it all…
July 20th, 2009 at 3:50 am
I think I just blew an O-ring! wowsers! What then is a Zetabyte????
July 20th, 2009 at 4:22 am
Holy Cow its tooo cool
July 20th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Im betting the amount that Mozy claims to have stored is the uncompressed numbers, and that they are using some sort of block level compression (deduplication seems to be what they call it nowadays). It would only make sense at the prices they offer and the amazingly slow rate of the backup (which could be their internet I suppose too) that I had experienced when evaluating this as a end-user.
What’s even more interesting to me is thinking about things like this as it relates to our own brains.
http://www.sizes.com/people/brain.htm
July 20th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Whahaaaaaaa ….. Yb…… ……….Zb………………
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
YOTTABYTE?….. ZETTABYTE?…..
WHOOOAOAAAAAAAAAA
July 20th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
@Nelsonian Actually it’s a ‘zettabyte’ and that’s a billion terabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
So to answer your question, a zettabyte is a f*ckton of data.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I wonder how long it’ll take to chkdsk,defrag, and/or fsck a petabyte drive (especially as NTFS)…
July 21st, 2009 at 12:22 pm
…I honestly thought more people knew about this stuff by now. Basically it goes Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Exa, Zetta, Yotta, Xona and so forth. Here’s a list: http://www.binarybits.net/blog/?tag=/xonabyte
July 21st, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Wow I am suitably dumbfounded with how much 50 Petabytes equates to!
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:57 pm
What’s next after PetaByte, when can i see it , next decade…… wait … next year.
July 26th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
I honestly think that we are getting to the point where things are going to become stagnant with computer technology. For the average consumer, the storage space currently available is more than adequate. Memory space and other things are substantial as well. We have gotten to the point with iPods and other handhold devices that we are limited by screen size (consumers don’t want a smaller screen) so they are at or near their smallest sizes.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
July 27th, 2009 at 1:31 am
Why would any normal person want a Pb drive unless they indeed wanted to download the whole Internets. I definately think they way you manage that much data as a home user will have to change. Like it was said above, defragging a Pb harddrive is going to be a nightmare unless your machine is fast enough.
July 27th, 2009 at 6:07 am
impressive awesome infographic, congratulations !!!
July 29th, 2009 at 3:37 am
great way to give us an idea of the scale of a petabyte, cheers!
August 10th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
That would have been very interesting to me if I hadn’t looked up a yottabyte the other day… Seriously, 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB is insane.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I love stuff like this, technology is friggin’ amazing.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Is there anything bigger than a petabyte??
August 24th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Soooo … if Megatron was the leader of the Decepticons … Gigatron would be … ? And Petatron??? OMG, we’re all doomed!
August 26th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
And in ten years we will look back and laugh at the size of a petabyte. We are in the age of teraflops and petabytes, 10 years ago, we were in awe of megaflops and gigabytes, 10 years from now, peta will be the mega of our time. Information will become more robust, and data storage will become as second nature to us as oxygen, taken completely for granted.
August 26th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Nice one, Venture Bro #1
September 18th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Wowzerz
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
a petabyte its a lot, and it will be a lot even in 20 years…so far there are no programs *im talking about programs for the average PC user* that pass from 25 GB of space usage…i think the petabyte hard drives are gonna come pretty soon to the market, maybe in a year or 2…but unless a new programs appears that uses at least 100 GB of space, i doubt companies will take seriously the production of petabyte hard drives
September 25th, 2009 at 10:10 am
petabyte age’s here
September 27th, 2009 at 4:19 am
Great post! Does that mean hosting fees will drop
October 14th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
just let love be
October 19th, 2009 at 7:27 am
i have a question, keeping in mind i DO actually quite like this, what single person HONESTLY needs 1000tb… i have trouble filling up 1 let alone 1000…
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Consider this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/28k_RED_CAMERA.png
Anyone that works with HD video knows how fast a terabyte gets filled- sometimes a couple per week. Look at HDTV compared to the technology that will be here very soon. Storing and backing up thousands of (larger than) HD video files will mean that petabytes will not be an unnecessary luxury but a practical necessity within 5 years.