One Trillion bytes

A co-worker recently sent me a link to an interesting site about what a trillion dollars looks like. A trillion dollars is cool and all, but since this is a technology blog, I thought I'd take a cut at:

What does one TRILLION bytes look like?

All this talk about "google" and "data"...

A billion bytes...

A hundred billion bytes...

Eight hundred billion bytes...

One TRILLION bytes...

What does that look like? I mean, these various numbers are tossed around like the amount of data stored on bill gates secret linux file server, so I thought I'd take Acorn out for a test drive and try to get a sense of what exactly a trillion bytes looks like.

We'll start with a 720k floppy. Currently the largest, most useless physical media device in general circulation. Most everyone has seen them, anybody who remembers Billy Beer have owned them. Guaranteed to lose data wherever they go.

5.5 720k floppy

A box of fur covered floppies is sits nicely on a desk and contains 7,200 Kbytes!. Fits in your pocket awkwardly but is more than enough for day or two of shamefully decadent 'image downloading'.

Box O' Floppies

Let's put all these thousands of bytes into perspective, shall we?

One floppy

Believe it or not, this next little pile is 9,676,800 bytes (150 5.25" floppies). You could stuff that into your go bag and walk around with it.

10 Meg

While a measly 9,676,800 bytes looked a little unimpressive, 96,768,000 bytes is a little more respectable. It fits neatly into 4 contiguous 8x10 standard cubicles

100 Meg

And One Gigabyte... now we're really getting somewhere... enough to store over 8 minutes of high-definition television.

1 Gig baby

Next we'll look at ONE TRILLION bytes. This is that number we've been hearing so much about. What is a trillion bytes? Well, it's a million million. It's a thousand billion. It's a one followed by 12 zeros.

You ready for this?

It's pretty surprising.

Go ahead...

Scroll down...

Ladies and gentlemen... I give you 1 trillion bytes...

c'mon... what were you expecting

Notice those platters are triple stacked baby.

So the next time you hear someone toss around the phrase "dude... I just got a new 1 Terabyte drive..."... that's all they're talking about.