Data size matters (infographic)

13 Nov 2013

Nowadays, data size measurements such as kilobyte and megabyte are commonplace in tech parlance, but a new infographic puts those measurements into context, and takes a look at drive technologies, too.

The infographic by datascience@berkeley on Visual.ly begins with the humble bit and works its way up in file size all the way to zettabyte and yottabyte. A yottabyte is equal to 1,000 zettabytes and one yottabyte is the size of the entire world wide web, according to the infographic.

The history of the hard drive and the future of the hard drive is then mapped out on the infographic, starting with refrigerator-sized units from 1956 that could only house 5 megabytes of data. Fast forward to 2020, when Seagate’s HAMR technology is predicted to allow hard drives to reach storage capabilities of 20 terabytes.

Data storage concept image via Shutterstock

Infographic

Tina Costanza was a journalist and sub-editor at Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com