I Started with KB … then MB … then GB … Now It’s PetaByte … Soon Exabyte … And Onto ZetaBytes … And then YottaBytes
This year, we will create around 418 zettabytes of data — that’s 418 billion 1TB hard disks. And we are probably just at the start of the growth of data … in fact, we will probably have to talk about Yottabtyes in the near future.
We are becoming swamped with the ever-increasing demand for data storage. Soon we will struggle to find enough hard disks to support the growth in data. But there’s a solution, with DNA storage we could map 215 Petabytes (215 million GBs) onto a single gram of DNA. The Escherichia coli bacterium, for example, has a storage density of about 10¹⁹ bits per cubic centimetre. We could then store every bit of data for the world within a single room. Unlike data stored in an electronic form, such as in an SSD or HDD, which degrade over time, DNA stores data that will last for over one million years.
For me, I need to get used to Petabytes and Exabytes, and see GBs and TBs as in the same way I have done with KBs and MBs in the past. My PhD, for example, was based on a computer with 16MB of memory — with a 500MB hard disk — and it was a great step forward at the time. Its floppy disk could hold a massive 720KB. My first office PC had only 640KB on memory, and my first home computer — a ZX81 — has 1KB. You…
