The Age Of The Petabyte Is Over! Here Comes The Zettabyte

[The Simpleton 2]

In an old episode of the TV show Friends, Chandler proudly announces that he has bought a new laptop, and when he described the specs of it, I got a hearty laugh. In fact, I took the trouble of finding that episode's transcript. Here's what he says:

 

[scene: Central Perk. Joey, Phoebe, Monica, and Chandler are there; Chandler is showing everyone his new computer.]

 

CHAN: All right, check out this bad boy. 12 megabytes of ram. 500 megabyte hard drive. Built-in spreadsheet capabilities and a modem that transmits at over 28,000 b.p.s.

Now I can't imagine what one could do with 12mb of RAM, but the thing I'm most interested in is the 500MB hard disk (drive). This episode came out in 1995, and 15 years later, we are dealing with hard disks with 1, 2 terabytes of storage. But there's a different story going on in the background and that is the story of higher capacities of storage.

 

The petabyte (1000 terabytes) was introduced when the amount of digital information released by all humans exceeded 1000terabytes. Now it has been discovered that very soon, we will run out of numbers to measure in petabytes as well. The current global output is around 8million petabytes. So a new unit called the Zettabyte has been introduced, which is equal to a billion terabytes. The global digital output is expected to cross 1.2 ZB in 2010.

 

Actually this term is old (used by Sun Microsystems in their ZFS file system) but it's being used for the first time to calculate the global digital output.

 

In case you're wondering where all that data will fit, there's an answer to that too. It is estimated that all this data will comfortably fit in 75 million iPads

[deadmad7 4]

First of all, I would like to start with a correction, in the end of the post it is not '75 million iPads' its '75 billion iPads'. (Remember, Apple already sold 1 Million iPads). Ahhhh! I'm having some really bad deja vu, because I saw the same episode on TV about a week ago and now you mention it. I remember when I used to be a kid my father had the best computer in the neighborhood and it had almost the same specs as the one you described. It's not like Chandler really thought that in a few decades, people will be making zettabytes of data. That's how we are now, what we think of Zettabyte will eventually be xetabyte or something and people in 10 years will be laughing at us for using pettabytes and zettabytes (i bet one of them will quote this article and quote The Simpleton). Though this information is considerably old and probably anyone with computer knowledge already knows this by now, it is kind of interesting to see how many we have evolved in terms of computer technology in just a few decades. The amount of data and information produced right now is about 0.8 ZT (Zettabyte) and it is expected to grow to 1 Zettabyte by the end of this year, thats enough to stack a bunch of DVDs from the earth to the moon and come back The rate of data produced is probably at the most highest right than ever because of social networking like facebook, myspace, orkut,etc. and Instant Messaging services like AOL and YIM. This is just going to get bigger and bigger.Maybe someone in 5 years will post in this thread and say 'Its 1000 Zettabytes' and counting...

[roger112 0]

Wow, things are moving at a very rapid pace, these days folks!! Zetabytes!! wow! I think all this just goes to prove some law I heard recently (probably termed Moore's law or something...yikes, I should pay more attention in class ). The guy said that tech power will always increase 2x fold year after year and here I'm thinking, its probably moved faster than he even anticipated!!We've certainly moved faster from terabyte to petabyte than we did from megabyte to gigabyte!! And then from petabyte to Zettabyte...it's so flipping awesome!!We're already there when petabyte aint been given light of the day yet, wow...tech stuff is fascination nowadays!!

[The Simpleton 2]

Actually between petabyte and zettabyte there is the exabyte but it wasn't publicised as much as the zettabyte! G.O.K. what units we will see in the future and how much data each person will begin to carry around.

[deadmad7 4]

Actually between petabyte and zettabyte there is the exabyte but it wasn't publicised as much as the zettabyte! G.O.K. what units we will see in the future and how much data each person will begin to carry around.

 

Yes, there is the exabyte but the reason it wasn't much publicized it isn't big enough to be counted with the zettabytes and petabytes -- and it isn't a big transition in anything...