For measuring length, there are units such as millimeter, centimeter, meter, kilometer. It is known that mass is measured in grams, kilograms, centners and tons. The running of time is expressed in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries. The computer works with information and there are also corresponding units of measurement for measuring its volume.
We already know that the computer perceives all information. Bit- This is the minimum unit of information measurement corresponding to one binary digit ("0" or "1").
Byte consists of eight bits. Using one byte, you can encode one character out of 256 possible (256 = 2 8). Thus, one byte is equal to one character, that is, 8 bits:
1 character = 8 bits = 1 byte.
The study of computer literacy involves the consideration of other, larger units of measurement of information.
Byte table:
1 byte = 8 bits
1 KB (1 Kilobyte) = 2 10 bytes = 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 bytes =
= 1024 bytes (approximately 1 thousand bytes - 10 3 bytes)
1 MB (1 Megabyte) = 2 20 bytes = 1024 kilobytes (approximately 1 million bytes - 10 6 bytes)
1 GB (1 Gigabyte) = 2 30 bytes = 1024 megabytes (approximately 1 billion bytes - 10 9 bytes)
1 TB (1 Terabyte) = 2 40 bytes = 1024 gigabytes (approximately 10 12 bytes). Terabyte is sometimes called ton.
1 PB (1 Petabyte) = 2 50 bytes = 1024 terabytes (approximately 10 15 bytes).
1 Exabyte= 2 60 bytes = 1024 petabytes (approximately 10 18 bytes).
1 Zettabyte= 2 70 bytes = 1024 exabytes (approximately 10 21 bytes).
1 Yottabyte= 2 80 bytes = 1,024 zettabytes (approximately 10 24 bytes).
In the above table, the powers of two (2 10, 2 20, 2 30, etc.) are the exact values for kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes. But the powers of the number 10 (more precisely, 10 3, 10 6, 10 9, etc.) will already be approximate values, rounded down. So 2 10 = 1024 bytes represents the exact value of a kilobyte, and 10 3 = 1000 bytes is an approximate value for a kilobyte.
This approximation (or rounding off) is quite acceptable and generally accepted.
Below is a table of bytes with English abbreviations (in the left column):
1 Kb ~ 10 3 b = 10 * 10 * 10 b = 1000 b - kilobyte
1 Mb ~ 10 6 b = 10 * 10 * 10 * 10 * 10 * 10 b = 1,000,000 b - megabyte
1 Gb ~ 10 9 b - gigabyte
1 Tb ~ 10 12 b - terabyte
1 Pb ~ 10 15 b - petabyte
1 Eb ~ 10 18 b - exabyte
1 Zb ~ 10 21 b - zettabyte
1 Yb ~ 10 24 b - yottabyte
Above in the right column are the so-called "decimal prefixes", which are used not only with bytes, but also in other areas of human activity. For example, the prefix "kilo" in the word "kilobyte" means a thousand bytes, just as in the case of a kilometer it corresponds to a thousand meters, and in the example with a kilogram it is equal to a thousand grams.
The question arises: is there a continuation of the byte table? In mathematics, there is the concept of infinity, which is denoted as an inverted eight: ∞.
It is clear that in the table of bytes, you can continue to add zeros, or rather, powers to the number 10 in this way: 10 27, 10 30, 10 33 and so on ad infinitum. But why is this necessary? In principle, terabytes and petabytes are enough for now. In the future, a yottabyte may not be enough.
Finally, a couple of examples on devices that can store terabytes and gigabytes of information.
There is a convenient "terabyte" - an external hard drive that is connected via a USB port to a computer. It can store a terabyte of information. It is especially convenient for laptops (where changing the hard drive can be problematic) and for backing up information. It is better to make backup copies of information in advance, and not after everything is gone.
Flash drives come in 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, 64 GB and even 1 terabyte.
They can hold 650 MB, 700 MB, 800 MB and 900 MB.
DVD-discs are designed for more information: 4.7 GB, 8.5 GB, 9.4 GB and 17 GB.
How much is a zettabyte of data? We count in books, grams and smartphones
We live in the age of information technology, which means that information is now the most precious resource on the planet: information is the oil of the 21st century. With intelligent analysis of information, you can predict business trends, stop the spread of disease, fight crime - the possibilities are endless. It is estimated that 90% of all data in the world has been generated in the past few years. Such an exciting prospect is overwhelming and even scary to imagine what will happen next.
However, if the volume of material precious resources can be somehow imagined (for example, 1 barrel of oil is approximately 158.988 liters, that is, about 16 buckets of oil; a 1 carat diamond is a stone with a diameter of 6.4 mm), imagine clearly 1 kilobit or 1 petabit of information is much more complicated.
In this article, we will try to visually visualize different units of the amount of information using different examples and imagine what huge amounts of data are stored today on our planet and, accordingly, what inconceivable units of measurement we have reached.
Let's take a look at the history of storage devices first (see the figure below). Thirty-five years ago, back in 1983, the largest hard drives stored about 10MB of data. Today this is barely enough to store two or three mp3 songs.
A typical laptop now has one terabyte of memory, nearly 100,000 times more than the first hard drive. But even that figure is laughable when you consider how much data we generate. According to IBM, every day humanity creates 2.5 quintillion (one followed by eighteen zeros) bytes of data, and 90% of the available digital data has been created in the past few years.
When dealing with computers and storage media, we are still looking at data on a gigabyte or terabyte scale. However, in general, humanity has already advanced far beyond this point of units for measuring the amount of data. The totals can be confusing and dizzy, so let's look at how you can quantify the data in the context of more descriptive things. Let's start with the usual units of digital information and then we will get to some more unusual values, such as yottabyte.
Units of information
- 1 byte: one character;
- 10 bytes: one word;
- 100 bytes: telegram or punched card.
Kilobyte (1024 Bytes)
- 1 kilobyte: a very short story;
- 2 Kilobytes: typewritten page;
- 10 kilobytes: an encyclopedic page or a deck of punched cards;
- 50 kilobytes: compressed page image;
- 100 kilobytes: low-resolution photography;
- 200 kilobytes: a box of punched cards;
- 500 kilobytes: a very heavy box of punched cards.
Megabyte (1024 Kilobytes)
- 1 megabyte: 873-page plain text book or 3.5-inch floppy disk;
- 2 megabytes: high resolution photo;
- 5 megabytes: complete works of Shakespeare or 30 seconds of television video;
- 10 megabytes: minute of high quality sound or digital chest x-ray;
- 20 megabytes: a box of floppy disks;
- 50 megabytes: digital mammogram;
- 100 megabytes: 1 meter of bookshelf or two-volume encyclopedic book;
- 200 megabytes: reel of 9-track tape;
- 500 megabytes: CD or hard drive of an old PC.
Gigabyte (1,024 megabytes, or 1,048.576 KB)
- 1 gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with completely printed pages or the contents of about 9 meters of books on a shelf;
- 2 gigabytes: the contents of 20 meters of books on the shelves;
- 20 gigabytes: high-quality audio collection of Beethoven's works or digital capacity of VHS cassette;
- 50 gigabytes: floor of books;
- 100 gigabytes: academic journals floor.
Terabyte (1024 Gigabytes)
- 1 terabyte:
- all x-rays in a major hospital,
- 1,613 CDs, 650 MB each,
- 4,581,298 books,
- all 350 episodes of The Simpsons or all 238 episodes of the series Friends.
- You can listen to mp3 songs (250,000 songs) without stopping for about 2 years or watch DVD movies for about 2 weeks. It would take approximately 50,000 trees to print a terabyte of data on paper. To print 1 terabyte, 250 million pages (printed on both sides) are required, if laid out one after the other, the length of the trail will be 16 km.
- 2 terabytes: Academic Research Library;
- 10 terabytes: Library of Congress Print Collection;
- 45 terabytes: all YouTube videos as of August 2006;
- 122 terabytes: The size of web pages loaded via Google in 1 day in 2009 (7.2 billion daily page views) x 17 kilobytes (the size of the average web page).
Petabyte (1,024 terabytes, or 1,048.576 gigabytes)
- 1 Petabyte:
- you can watch HDTV continuously for 13 years,
- Internet archive data volume in 2004,
- A stack of CDs 3 km high,
- 500 billion pages of standard printed text.
- 15 Petabytes of data: The amount of data from the Hadron Collider results per year.
- 20 Petabytes: The storage capacity of all hard drives manufactured in 1995.
- 200 Petabytes: All Books Ever Printed.
Exabytes (1,024 Petabytes)
1 Exabyte equals 250 million DVDs.
1 Exabyte of Internet traffic data was generated every day in 2012.
5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by humans.
Zettabytes (1,024 Exabytes)
How to evaluate a zettabyte, how much is it? We can say that this is a sextillion bytes or 1 million million gigabytes.
In terms of modern information systems, Zettabyte (ZB) is really big. Previously, this word was not used, Microsoft Office Word underlines it in red, and if you write it with one letter, then when checking spelling, Word recommends replacing the word Petabyte.
So how big is a zettabyte? To imagine its size, it takes about 83 million 12 terabytes of hard drives to store 1 ZB. One Zettabyte hard drive can watch high-definition 4K video for 63 million years.
To make it even easier to imagine 1 ZB, let's translate it to the things that we use every day. The most popular new smartphones today have a storage capacity of 32 gigabytes (GB). To get 1 ZB, you will need to take the memory of all 34 359 738 368 (34.4 billion) smartphones. If you stack 34.4 billion Samsung S5 smartphones one after another (in length), you can circumnavigate the Earth 181.2 times, or you can circumnavigate Jupiter almost 11 times.
In 2011, 1.8 Zetabytes of information were generated, which is enough to fill the memory of 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads. This number of iPads will be enough to build the great iPad Wall in China, twice the height of the original Chinese Wall.
If every terabyte in zettabyte were a kilometer, that would be the equivalent of 1,300 trips to and from the moon (76,800 kilometers).
If every petabyte in zettabyte was a centimeter, then we could reach a height 12 times higher than the Burj Khalifa (the tallest skyscraper in the world at 828 meters).
If every gigabyte in zettabyte was a meter, it could cover the distance of the Amazon River more than 150,000 times (the longest river in the world - 6992 kilometers).
If every gigabyte in a zettabyte were a brick, China's 258 Great Walls (out of 3.873 billion bricks) could be built.
Yottabyte (1.204 Zettabyte, or 1.208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes)
This is a septillion bytes, or 2 to the power of 80 bytes.
On iotta, the officially recognized SI prefix system stops, probably because people did not need to work with more information. However, there are other units of measurement that go well beyond the iota and are recognized by some experts in their fields. For example, brontobyte is 1 followed by 27 zeros, and some believe that this will be the data scale provided by the Internet of Things (smart devices, from toasters and refrigerators to home sensors that constantly transmit and receive data). Gegobyte is 10 to 30, which is currently useless to express in a number of DVDs or the like. There is also an IEEE standard for the use of binary prefixes, but although the standard is finally adopted, its implementation is rather slow. The digital community has become accustomed to SI consoles, and even new operating systems and applications still continue to use them.
At present, the amount of information is growing exponentially; even now, the information world of the planet is an ocean of data, in which only a small part of the water is useful and used. But it is worth considering what will happen if the ocean level continues to rise rapidly. Already in the modern amount of information it is easy to overwhelm. During the analysis of a selected part of the data of any area, a lot of new unprocessed information appears, and so on ad infinitum.
In conclusion, we will give some more interesting visual pictures by which you can estimate the amount of information in relation to other things that are familiar to us.
Modern computers are improving, the speed of data processing is growing, and at the same time the volume of processed and stored information is growing. To an inexperienced user, it seems strange that such previously unknown names as terabyte or even petabyte will soon become a common measure of desktop PC memory. And what will follow the terabyte?
Before delving into the jungle of new names of units for measuring the amount of information, let's clarify what it is and why it is.
“Yes” or “no”? - that is the question.
To begin with, the German philosopher, mathematician, physicist, lawyer, historian and linguist Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who is one of the founders of differential and integral calculus, anticipated the principles of modern mathematical logic. Back in 1714, Gottfried von Leibniz, a binary code (binary system) was developed, which is the basis (or alphabet) for all computers. The uniqueness of the binary code is that information of any kind can be represented in the binary code as a sequence of zeros and ones. Binary code can describe everything.
However, you have to pay for this versatility - the binary code is quite "voluminous". For example, the letter A (Latin) is represented as 01000001. In addition, the world in which we live (sometimes also called analog) is continuous, i.e. any event is not interrupted and exists in any, the shortest period of time. The digital world (it is also called virtual), being a copy (or synthetics) of the real world, is a discrete world in which an event exists (for example, in the form of frames) and is generated with a certain frequency (sampling). Digital information is created by converting analog information into binary code (so-called digitization). Examples include photography and video. One snapshot of a photo is a digital “fingerprint” of the event at the moment it was taken. If the pictures (frames) are taken one after another, then the illusion of a real event is created (the principle of cinema is the principle of "pulling" a certain number of frames per second). So, the more frames with the best resolution at a certain time change on the screen, the more realistic the picture is.
That is why, with the growth of PC performance, we can afford to process large amounts of information in less time, getting more and more real picture (sound, etc.) in real time. As a result, the amount of processed and stored information grows exponentially.
For example, a typical desktop PC in 1991 (IBM AT) was clocked at 8-12 MHz, 16 bit, 2-4 MB of RAM, and the hard disk did not exceed 40 MB. Today it is difficult to find a handheld device that has such low parameters. Even a cell phone today has megabytes of memory.
A modern, productive desktop PC has a clock speed of 3GHz, RAM from 1 to 4 GB, and the total amount of hard drives is estimated at 1 terabyte (and even more). Hard drives with a capacity of about 1 terabyte will appear in the near future, because 500 GB has already been passed.
Where does the data begin.
Computers operate with bytes of information.
A byte (byte) is a unit of information or memory in a computer, usually equal to 8 bits.
Actually, a byte, in modern computers, is the smallest unit that an address can have. The smallest unit of information is the bit.
Bit (English Bit-binary digit) is the minimum unit of measurement of the amount of information in the computer's memory, equal to one binary digit.
A bit is a unit of measurement of information equal to the amount of information that is contained in one binary digit or in the answer to a question that can be answered “yes” or “no” and no other. A bit can also correspond to an “on” or “off” state (“1” or “0”).
The earliest mention of this term dates back to around 1948. The term "bit" appears in an article by SE Chenon published in the Bell Systems Technical Journal. It is generally accepted that bit is an abbreviated form of the phrase "binary digit" - "binary digit". It is also possible that when creating the term bit, the meaning of the ordinary English word bit-piece, particle was played on.
So, today we operate with either bits or bytes. Moreover, for various units of measurement of the number of bits and bytes, we use the standard prefixes “kilo”, “giga”, “mega”, etc. While in fact, for example, the prefix "kilo" means 1000, but when applied to bytes, it is 1024 bytes. The point is that a kilobyte is 2 10 bytes or 1024 bytes. Many manufacturers are a little disingenuous when they indicate the number of MB in thousands, and not in 1024.
So, we know that 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes.
1 Megabyte, this is the number of bytes equal to one million, or rather 2 20, which is 1,048,576 bytes.
It is no longer uncommon to hear from advanced users that the total amount of memory in his PC exceeds 1 Terabyte. The prefix "tera" means multiplication by one trillion, but in computer science this number is 2 40, so 1 Terabyte is 1,099 511 627 776 bytes.
Some of you have heard of the number of petabytes. Dictionaries five years ago no longer know this number. So 1 petabyte is 2 50 or 1 125 899 906 842 624 bytes (for convenience, we will also indicate that this is 10 15). If you think that this is the maximum number by which the number of bytes is measured today, then you are wrong.
What will follow the terabyte?
While microprocessor developers go into minimizing technical processes using diminutive prefixes: “mini”, “micro”, “nano”, software developers come up with names for new numbers to indicate the number of bytes.
About petabyte has already been mentioned, what's next? Digging through new dictionaries, I found the following terms:
1 exabyte (exabyte) Is a unit of information or memory in a computer, equal to 2 60 (10 18) or 1 152 921 505 606 846 976 bytes;
1 zettabyte Is a unit of information or memory in a computer, equal to 2 70 (10 21) or 1 180 591 620 717 411 303 424 bytes;
1 yottobyte (yottabyte) Is a unit of information or memory in a computer, equal to 2 80 (10 24) or 1 208 92 81 614 629 174 706 176 bytes;
I haven't found anything else yet. I noticed such a thing: the spell checker on my laptop knows numbers including up to exabyte, starting with zettabyte underlines all numbers in red indicating that “there are no options”. So, so far, even the spelling of MS Word does not know new numbers. Not to mention the users.
By the way, I learned that the current capacity limit of the Linux operating system is 144 PB. I think that by the time this becomes critical, Linux users will come up with something and get around this limitation.
Everyone probably knows that AMD, and after it Intel, have implemented AMD x86-64 and Intel EM 64T technologies, precisely in order to bypass the 4 GB addressable memory limitations. Five years ago, it seemed that such amounts of RAM for desktop systems with x86 architecture would not be needed for a long time. And now we almost got it that more than 4 GB of RAM will be installed in a gaming desktop PC.
