Digital Big Bang — 161 Exabytes In 2006

An anonymous reader tips us to an AP story on a recent study of how much data we are producing. IDC estimates that in 2006 we created, captured, and replicated 161 exabytes of digital information. The last time anyone tried to estimate global information volume, in 2003, researchers at UC Berkeley came up with 5 exabytes. (The current study tries to account for duplicating data — on the same assumptions as the 2003 study it would have come out at 40 exabytes.) By 2010, according to IDC, we will be producing far more data than we will have room to store, closing in on a zettabyte.

What's an exabyte?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply put, a lot [wikipedia.org]

10^18 bytes, or One million terabytes

Re:And here I thought Malthus was dead

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

As the article notes, the amount we produce is not the same as the amount we would actually want to store. Since that 161EB includes duplications such as broadcasting, phone calls, and all manner of temporary or real-time data it's not really relevant to compare that number with storage capabilities as the summary implies.

Re:How many...

[franksands]

Since you asked:

Oh, the equivalents! That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as 3 million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than 2 billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.

I don't have anime estimates, but I can make a Heroes [wikipedia.org] analogy.a hi-def episode is more or less 700mb. Considering the first season has 23 episodes, that would make 16.1gb. So 161 exabytes would be 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) seasons of Heroes. Since the earth currenlty has around 6.6 billion people, this would mean that you would have 1 episode for each person on the planet, and all the people of China, India and the US would have a second episode. That's how big it is.

Regarding the storage space, I call shenanigans. We already have HDD that stores terabytes. A couple years from now, MS office will require that space to be installed.

Re:What's an exabyte?

[springbox]

Did they measure in exabytes or exbibytes [wikipedia.org] (2^60 bytes)? The difference between 161 exabytes and 161 exbibytes are 24,620,362,241,702,363,136 bytes - about 21.36 exbibytes. Kind of important since the margin of error will only increase as the measured data grows. (Lets stop using the SI units when we don't actually mean it.)

Re:The number is way too low!

[Simon80]

RTFS - it's not about bandwidth, it's about unique data, knowledge, ideas, information.

50 Exabytes for $30.5 Billion

[nbritton]

50 Exabytes = (50)1024 petabytes = (50)1048576 terabytes:

RAID6 (24 Drives -2{Parity} -1{Hot Spare} = 21) 750GB, 13.48TB ZFS/Solaris:
  93,345,048 750GB Hard Drives:     $17,735,559,120
   3,889,377 Areca ARC-1280ML:       $4,317,208,470
   1,944,689 Motherboards/Mem/CPU:     $766,207,466
   1,944,689 5U Rackmount Chassis's: $4,546,682,882
     194,469 4 Post 50U Racks:          $45,700,215
       3,684 528-port 1Gbps Switches:  $374,294,400
          40 96-port 10Gbps Switches:   $11,424,000
   1,948,935 Network Cables:             $2,020,812
           ? Assembly Robots/Misc.     $111,000,000

Sub Total:                          $27,910,097,365
Tax/Shipping:                        $2,645,915,779
Grand Total:                        $30,556,013,144

$470 billion cheaper then the IRAQ war.