An Exabyte sounds like a lot

Recently I was watching Ocean’s 13 which passed the time reasonably pleasantly. There was a supposedly awesome computer which our handsome heroes had to overcome called “The Greco”. Apparently it stored its data “in a field of Exabytes”.

This got me thinking about all the different storage metrics and the fact many of us can get them confused. I decided to pop the following list down for your viewing pleasure…

Name	Abbreviation	Amount
bit	b	Fundamental unit of data storage
Nibble		4 bits
Byte	B	8 bits
Kilobyte	kB	1024 Bytes
Megabyte	MB	1024 Kilobytes
Gigabyte	GB	1024 Megabytes
Terabyte	TB	1024 Gigabytes
Petabyte	PB	1024 TB
Exabyte	EB	1024 PB

An Exabyte is seriously huge! If you take it that DVD quality video requires a bandwidth of around 5Mbits/s plus about 0.45Mbits/s for its audio that gives a total bandwidth of 5.45Mbits/s. This equals 0.68MB/s. Now an Exabyte is a million million MB so divide that by 0.68, then by 60, then by 24, and finally by 365 and the answer is:

An Exabyte would be able to store 46,632 hours of playback time!!

Comments

Anonymous said…

So, when in 2007 the first 1TB harddisk was announced, this computer already had a million of them connected :)

19 August 2015 at 19:46

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