Thursday, June 05, 2008

By 2010 the amount of storage available will be 40% less that the information created

This report -- The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010 -- contains a ton of information, but it can be summarized very simply. Humanity is creating information in many different ways and lots of it. By 2010 (figure 2, page 3), humanity will create 1,000,000 petabytes of information, but only have storage space for 600,000 petabytes. (Perhaps some of that information/data will not need to be stored.) One problem is replication, which is eating up storage space. (Many copies do keep stuff safe, but it also uses more storage space.) And of course, keeping information available/readable long-term is a serious issue and will only grow worse.

You are likely worried about the longevity of your stuff. Good. You might want to skim the report so you can see the bigger picture and the long-term implications.

What is a petabyte? A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes. [Addendum 2:11 p.m.: Okay, yes, the numbers should technically be 1024. The report- page 2 - uses 1000 for simplicity and I copied the information from the report.]

2:23 p.m. -- Sorry about the typos...more than usual. Sigh.

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Anonymous said...

Maybe I am being pedantic, but you probably should have written "about 1000" instead of writing that the various units were exactly multiplies of 1000. In actuality, they are multiples of 1024.

Jill Hurst-Wahl said...

You are correct. I copied the info from the report and have now noted above that the report uses 1000 for simplicity.

Richard L. Hess said...

Well, actually, TB and PB refer to the SI prefixes that are multiples of 1000 as used by drive makers.

Microsoft and others use the confusing JEDEC binary prefixes that have been replaced since 1999 by the IEC binary prefixes. See