Zettabyte of information – a new nerdy term!
It is a known fact that the volume of information that we encounter during a single day in the 21st century is more than a person received in a lifetime at the beginning of the 20th century. We all live in times when the amount of available information is so overwhelming that we are unable to effectively process and utilize it.
It is a product of the high-tech age and it comes from all sources including internet, TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, regular mail, e-mail, billboards, and many other types of information.
According to recent studies the size of the information universe is 800,000 petabytes. Each petabyte is a million gigabytes, or the equivalent of 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives. If you stored all of this data on DVDs the stack would reach from the Earth to the moon and back.
We should also keep in mind that a terabyte could hold about 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images or about 300 hours of good quality video. A terabyte could hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ten Terabytes could hold the printed collection of the Library of Congress.
Lets remind ourselves:
· 1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
· 1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
· 1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
· 1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
· 1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
It is predicted that next year’s total will reach 1.2 million Petabytes, or 1.2 Zettabytes.
Welcome to the era of the Zettabyte, which is equivalent to 1 million Petabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
Zettabyte is a new term created to accommodate the exponential increase of data creation, inspired by social networking, image, and video files, VOIP, and the wealth of new kinds of devices on which information bytes can be stored.
We should remember this new term Zettabyte since it will be with us soon, and it will remain for long. But not for too long since Yottabyte (1000 Zettabytes) is just around the corner!
Dobrica Savić
