Jan 4 2010Learning Is Fun: Mommy, What's A Petabyte?

Wow! This makes my toaster feel so insignificant

HOW COULD YOU NEED MORE THAN 50 PETABYTES?!!
thats fracking rediculous

I can remember when I paid $180 for a 180 Mb hard drive. Goddamn it, I am old.

A Petabyte is a million gigabytes, not 1,000 as stated in your article.

Wonder when they'll be able to measure how much info we can hold in our heads.

A Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes! not Gigs!!!

Get with the programme.

Will the price of storage continuously falling, wouldn't it be premature to estimate that a 1.2 pedabyte harddrive would cost $750?

I'm sorry dear master of Geekologie, and this in no way should imply service or "uncle Tom"-ness to our future robot overlords, but isn't a Terrabyte 1000 Gigabytes? and a Petabyte is 1000 of them?

I'm sorry master, forgive my insolence!

OLD? Hell I paid almost $1000 for a 10 megabyte HD for a commadore 64! and we thought you could NEVER use that much.

Will be using those spaces. With full uncompressed movies, porn, TV shows. 1000 hour games. 1 million songs etc.

@8 - See, you don't challenge GW because when you want to, you're wrong.

i bought a 512mb sd card for $140 back in 2003. I was a dumbass.
-wes-

@ 4 & 8
It syas "a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes (1,000 terabytes)".
Reading comprehension/retention is key if you'd like to keep yourself from looking like a petabyte of canned dumbfuck.

does that make a yodabyte a sage, green (no pun) jedi byte with fluff in his ears?

Wow, 1 petabyte is 4.19707115 × 10^17 nanoseconds of HD video? Nice :)

@13 It changed. just sayin

@5 i dunno about you, but im guessing the average "non-thinking" american can hold roughly only a few gigs. Some people are just plain stupid.

@13. Tragic1 - It is tragic that you don't realize a website owner can edit his posts. That's ok though, we need people like you for meatshields when the robot/zombie uprising comes.

and @11. Ashlins - I know, I've felt dirty all morning because of it, nothing a healthy dose of peadobear jokes, German porn, and shots of rubbing alochol off a homeless tranny can't fix!

It's Paedabyte not pedabyte.

this is insane. I want one Petabyte Drive

When does it say 1 Petabyte is 1000 Megabyte? It has a graph with 1000 megabytes feeding into 1000 terabytes which feed into 1000 petabytes. Please quote or tell me where it says 1 Petabyte is 1000 Megabytes?

Peta files?

My dick is 1.3 Petabytes.

@18 Oh I realized it. I thought it would be funny to "troll out" and watch another troll flame me. I fapped. Thanks.

@ 19 - what are you talking about lol??

@24

You're tragic.

@25
Read the first 2 lines. Where he tells us the difference between a Paetabyte and a Petabyte. He used the incorrect american spelling.

Wow.

A (human) brain contains 100-giga neurons and 100-tera synaptic connections. Each neuron has about 1000 hair-like connections to other neurons. You could probably encode an entire brain state in a petabyte.

Each neuron runs at about 100 Hz (?), 10 million times slower than a computer. But all the neurons work at the same time so the comparison isn't very meaningful. It'd take about 10 thousand computers to produce the same number of cycles as a human brain.

BlueGene/L consists of over 100 thousand computers working together. There are proprietary military computers that are about 10 times more powerful than that.

i wonder if we'll ever be alive the day that a Gigabite will become the new Bite.

you say it's impossible to fill a Petabite; yee of little faith, people used to say it's impossible to fill a terabyte.

My first hard drive was 62mb.
Nowadays if I only have 2gb free on my hdd, I feel like the drive is full.

I wouldn't mind downloading "The entire written works of mankind" ... I wonder how long 50 petabytes is going to take

I just bought a 500 GB hard drive. Why would you want a a PETABYTE?!

@23

Do you mean 1.3 petameters?

@32: Just because 500GB is enough for you, doesn't mean there aren't people who need more :p

My 3,25 TB of diskspace are nearly full (750 GB+1TB+1,5TB). Don't judge me!

@8 [sarcastically] Like you've never made a mucking fistake?
...... just sayin

You'll need all that for you at home holo-suite virtal reality... while the real world rots. How much memory does an AI need to become self-aware? Or is that more processing power? Hmmm.

This graphic is pretty slick and would really be helpful... but it also contains at least three glaring errors.

* That half-circle graph to show 342% growth is totally off in scale. That white half-circle is about 11.7 times the area of the green one. (It's about 3.4 times as wide, but also 3.4 times as tall.)

* Hard drive space wasn't $228 a GB in March 1998. Maybe in 1996. By 3/98 it was down to $50-60 a GB. The 1998 drive with the highest cost per MB shown here is $529.99 Canadian (about $373 US at the time) for 6.4GB, or $58 per GB.
http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625/winchest.html

* In the last part, a petabyte is indicated by one green square, but the "15+ petabytes" only has 10 squares.

Nice way to present some hard-to-fathom data, but it's too bad they didn't put in a little effort to get it right.

@5
Only a couple bits. Smart people from history can hold a few more bits, which is why they are smart.

· 1 Bit = Binary Digit
· 8 Bits = 1 Byte
· 1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
· 1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
· 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
· 1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
· 1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
· 1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
· 1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
· 1024 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte
· 1024 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte
· 1024 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte

This is written in a primary-school fashion for morons.
"Wow the internet is big" kinda stuff.

This obviously came from the USA where they treat citizens like idiots.

@2
well.... i was thinking: how could you possibly need more than 80 gb back in 2003 so hay....

@40. Yes. Because it's not just an ad for Mozy or anything... clearly there is a criticism of the U.S. to be made... Funny how that fancy book lurnin' you fellers 'parently be gettin' doesn't keep ya from bein' a dumb ass.

@26 I am that. And you hasabrain for noticing.

its pedobyte.

Did he say Yoda bites? Yoda is friggin cool man!

Now Bronto bites? Aren't those good with sweet and sour sauce? Chicken tenders shaped into dinosaurs are good with Sprite and cherry syrup. Mmmm..

Yeah, I just bought a 50 petabyte hard drive... It can hold all written information in the history of the world... No big deal

wow, the last description just melted my effing mind

This visualization may be a bit over-simplified as lachlan @40 (the person pretending to be a foreigner in order to seem cool and important) pointed out, but I enjoy it very much. Anyone can memorize dry, dull facts about how many bits are in a byte and all that, but seeing it represented like this really makes an impression. Things like this make me proud of mankind's advancements, and give me hope for a future where a petabyte is as common as a gigabyte. We'll need that amount of computer memory in order to map the universe... that and for A.I.

And on a related note, petabytes are ludicrously expensive but are currently available to buy. A 9 petabyte external will cost you just under $1 million! One petabyte is roughly $100,000! Insane! I remember when a megabyte was a big deal!

First it says a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes (right under "The Price of 1GB Has Decreased").

Then it says 1024 gigabytes is 1 terabyte.

Well which one is it?

(For those that say 1024, Microsoft is pretty much the only company that still uses that old, inaccurate shorthand. But Windows runs the world, so lots of people are wrong together.)

"HOW COULD YOU NEED MORE THAN 50 PETABYTES?!!
thats fracking rediculous"

I remember when someone said 'How could you need more than 10GB?!?!'

@ 27 ANON - im sorry i scanned the whole article, also "googled" paetabyte, and there were only 3 results, the first being your post to me lol. im pretty sure there is only one spelling of petabyte, and its "P-E-T-A-B-Y-T-E" . please, show me some article or something to correct my ignorance :)

omg.

nevermind

im dumb lmao , i thought he was saying that an actual petabyte is spelled paetabyte, i didnt even see that he was correctly analagizing GW's reference toi a PAEDOPHILE lol im sorry all

No probs. :)

Google says it'll take 850.638799 years to download 50 petabytes of data on my 2 megabyte/second connection.

That's not long, right? Considering it only took 5,500 years or something to generate those 50 petabytes of data. ;)

I have no idea what is coming down the pipe as far as video quality, but I am sure "they" will find something to take up enough space to warrant the use of a 1,2,10,50 or 100 Petabyte hard drive. MMmmmm, how about a 500 Petabyte solid state drive...

* err 1, 2, 10, 50 or 100 -forgot to leave spaces and it looks like a large number, sry

Well Lucky me, I have a 1.2 petabyte hard drive and its full, been ripping movies for the last 2 weeks all blu-ray.. I'll get back to u once i have counted them all... I know each one at around 27GB each..