The Internet by 2015: Introduction of the Zettabyte {infograph}

As the internet becomes more and more vast with rich media like graphics, audio, and video; our consumption of that media is also increasing at an alarming rate. Recent findings from Cisco point to the need to add the term “zettabyte” to our daily lexicon, by as soon as 2015.

To place that amount of volume in more practical terms, an exabyte alone has the capacity to hold over 36,000 years worth of HD quality video…or stream the entire Netflix catalog more than 3,000 times. A zettabyte is equivalent to about 250 billion DVDs.

Curious about the size of a zettabyte worth of storage? A zettabyte is a billion terabytes. That is kind of difficult to imagine. I figured out what this would be using today’s standards of a 3 terabyte external hard drive (Western Digital). Here is what I came up with:

• Dimensions: Length 6.94″, Height 7.94″, Width 1.94″
• Volume: ~106.90 cubic inches (~0.0618634259 cubic feet)
• Weight: 3.0 pounds
• Units Necessary: ~333,333,334 (1 billion divided by 3 as we have a 3 terabyte drive)
• Total Volume: ~20,621,142 cubic feet
• Total Weight: 1 billion pounds (500,000 Tons)

To give you an idea of what 20,621,142 cubic feet is, the Empire State Building is about 37 million cubic feet, so the stack of external hard drives would stand half as tall as the Empire State Building. 500,000 tons is equivalent to 62,500 elephants. That is a lot of space, weight, and data by today’s standards.

Source: Cisco Blogs

Enjoy!