The data transferred annually by the internet will surpass a Zettabyte in 2016, according to the Cisco’s Visual Networking Index. Keeping this in mind, Seagate has issued a new infographic fashioned by XO Communications.
Announcing 2016 as the “Year of the Zettabyte”, Seagate appears to be gearing up for Cisco’s forecast. The American company is a major player in the data storage sector specialising in the production of hard drives.
The Zettabyte is, quite obviously, a multiple of the unit byte for digital information, and the prefix ‘Zetta’ indicates multiplication by the seventh power of 1000 or 1021 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one Zettabyte is one sextillion bytes, which is a whopping ‘twenty-one’ zeroes after one.
To put the colossal volume of the data we are talking about into perspective, there are two points listed in the infographic:
• If:
1 byte = 1 character of text;
1 Zettabyte = ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoy 323 trillion times.
• If:
1 gigabyte = 1 ball from a child’s ball pit;
1 Zettabyte = number of balls that could turn Titanic into a giant ball pit 500 times.
To illustrate the magnitude of data in question, the infographic also came up with a real-time illustration. It cites the example of a gigabyte that can store 960 minutes of music and pits it against a Zettabyte that can store 2 billion years of music!
