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How much would it cost you to store the world’s data? The total data in the world is estimated at 3.6 zettabytes and the average 6TB hard drive costs $400 (USD). That means you would have to spend $71.6 billion on 178 million hard drives.

Also, make sure you have a lot of storage for those hard drives. They will take up 450,000 cubic kilometers of space.﻿
David Ward's profile photoakhilesh gundaboina's profile photosyedali abdullah's profile photoMathew Hawk's profile photo
I'd love to see the cost and volume of the world's storage graphed over time (with predictions for the future)﻿
Is this just counting everything stored in total on hard drives, or does it include an estimation of what is currently being transmitted? After all, some data only exists for a short amount of time. Is overhead (error correcting codes, headers, etc) counted as well, or is it ignored? And does this 3.6 zettabytes include duplicate data, or has this been accounted for?﻿
There's a bit of #BadMath in there.  At 6TB, you need 600 million drives to add up to 3.6 ZB. Which means the cost would be $240 billion.

Even with 600 million drives, you'd need about 0.2 cu km of space (and that's including a 1000:1 ratio of extra space for infrastructure beyond the drives).﻿
Oh, and the current price of a 6TB hard drives is > $1600.﻿
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