We had a email yesterday from Berkeley School of Information, which a police notice to show one of their infographics on our blog as they feel is would be beneficial to our members and visitors. We believe too it could be of use to our visitors too.
Most people understand the relative size of their digital files. That report you just saved is 318 kilobytes (KB); those vacation photos tally 750 megabytes (MB); your new iPod holds 20 gigabytes (GB) of music. When data sets start to grow, however, their sizes become more difficult to explain. How much does a terabyte (TB) hold? How many DVDs would it take to reach a zettabyte? And what on earth is a yottabyte?
Hard drive capacity has increased 50-million-fold since 1956. It took 26 years to create a 1 GB hard drive, but between 2007 and 2011, hard drives quadrupled in size from 1 TB to 4 TB. Within the next ten years, 20 TB hard drives may even become commonplace.
In this infographic, datascience@berkeley has collected some real-life examples to help explain the scope of data. We’ve also provided a timeline of hard drive innovation and a glimpse at where the data storage industry is heading. Feel free to share, because after all…Data Size Matters.
Brought to you by datascience@berkeley: Master of Information and Data Science
