Storage Sizes (Real world Explanations)

Byte
8 bits = 1 Byte ("bit" is short for "binary digit")

• 1 byte can store 1 keystroke.

Kilobyte
(1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte)

• A kilobyte is the equivalent of about 2/3rds of a page of text.

• In the late 1970's, a 5 1/4" floppy disk held about 150 kilobytes.

Megabyte
(1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte)

• A megabyte can hold the text of 1 to 2 books in uncompressed format. Mark

Twain's Huckleberry Finn fits in a 563Kb text file. His Following the Equator takes
1.05Mb.
• If you were tired of swapping floppies on your desktop computer, in the early
1980's you could buy a 5 megabyte hard disk for just over $2000. It was about the
size of a shoebox.
• A 3 1/2" floppy disk holds 1.44 megabytes of data. These were commonly available
by the mid 1980's.

Gigabyte
(1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte)

• One gigabyte can hold the text of over 1,000 books. That's a pretty decent-sized
library bookshelf.
• A compact disc holds about 3/4ths of a gigabyte. These were also available in the
mid-1980's. By the mid-1990's recordable CDs were available for data storage, and
by the late 1990's gigabyte hard disks were becoming common.
• A gigabyte holds about 100 minutes of CD quality stereo music.
• Single-sided DVDs hold from 4.7 gigabytes if recorded in one layer, or about 8.5
gigabytes if double-layered. Computer recordable DVDs are single-layered. Movie
DVDs are usually double-layered.
• One gigabyte holds about 25 minutes of DVD-quality video. A typical movie
requires about 6 gigabytes of storage.

Terabyte
(1,024 gigabytes, or a million megabytes = 1 Terabyte)

• Over 1,000,000 books. We're talking about a pretty large library here.
• All the text in all the printed matter in the Library of Congress would fit in about 20
terabytes.
 • A terabyte would hold the contents of about 2,000 audio CDs in original
uncompressed format.
• A terabyte can hold over 160 DVD movies.
• If Moore's Law continues to hold when applied to data storage, we'll have one
terabyte storage devices commonly available by 2010. They'll as portable as CDs
and DVDs are now.

Peta-byte
(1,000 terabytes = A million gigabytes = A billion megabytes = 1 Peta-Byte)
• Over one billion books. Are there even that many unique books in the history of
printing?
• 2 peta-bytes are estimated to be as big as the contents of all U.S. academic
research libraries and 200 peta-bytes as "all printed material". But of course those
include duplicate copies!
• A peta-byte could hold about 2 million audio CDs, uncompressed. Compress them
to 128kbps MP3 files, and you'll fit about 20 million CDs. This is in the range of all
recordings ever made.
• 160,000 DVD movies would fit in a peta-byte.
• You could have a nice DVD-quality collection of all films ever released in about 2
peta-bytes. The Internet Movie Database lists about 250,000 theatrical releases,
and about 325,000 including made-for-TV movies and other films.
• So in about 4 or 5 peta-bytes, we fit ALL OF THE ABOVE. All books. All audio
recordings. All movies. We can add more peta-bytes and start to add in all
photographs ever taken. Then start adding everything ever broadcast on
television...

Exabyte
(1,024 Peta bytes = 1 Exabyte)
• We could pretty comfortably fit everything ever broadcast or published within a
few exa-bytes.
• 5 Exabyte’s would hold all words ever spoken. The estimates for how many people
have lived on Earth since the beginning are mostly around 100 billion ( 1 | 2 | 3 |
4 ). Using that number (1011), we can compute that 1018 words divided by 1011
people is 107, or ten million. So we have room in 5 peta-bytes for ten million words
from every person who has ever lived on this planet.
• Using a generous average life expectancy of 45 years (we didn't reach an average
of 50 until after 1900), that's an average of 16436 days per life. Divide that into
ten millions words and you find that each person is allotted 608 words per day.
That sounds rather low considering some people I know. On the other hand, early
humans were probably not great conversationalists, and time spent as babies will
bring the average down, also. But if you're more comfortable using an average of
6000 words a day, we're still estimating on the order of Exabyte’s (50) if someone
had bothered to record all those words.
 Zeta-byte
1024 Exabyte’s = 1 Zeta byte (This is getting beyond comprehension)
• The speed of light is 186,287 miles per second. That's over 7 times around the
Earth in one second. A light year is the distance light travels in one year. That
distance is about 9.4x1015 meters.
• Thus, a "zeta-byte" is more than 5 light years. The closest star to us, Alpha
Centauri, is about 4 light years away.

Yotta-byte
1024 Zet-byte = 1 Yotta-byte
• Just in case you were wondering, a "yotta-byte" would be about 5,000 light years.
(A "parsec" is 3.3 light years, so we could also say that a "yotta-byte" is just over
1500 parsecs. )
• Our Milky Way galaxy is about 150,000 light years across. That's 30 yottabytes.

8 Bits = 1 Byte
1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobytes
1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1024 Exabyte= 1 Zetabyte
1024 Zetabytes = 1 Yottabyte