just an asterisk

This is an error message I received today when trying to copy a game from one drive to another.  At first, it seems quite normal.  I just don’t have enough space on my drive.  Or do I?  Check a little closer at the highlighted text:

What?  Almost 6PB?  I have that much data on my external hard-drive?

What is funny about this, at least in a geeky way, is that 6 Petabytes is a lot.  In fact, it’s so much, that I couldn’t name a single natural or man-made quantity even approaching a PB (and my spell check keeps telling me that it’s not a word).

To prove a little explanation, I did a little searching and found a few interesting hits.  For example, James Cameron’s 3D money suck Avatar takes up 1PB when it’s fully rendered.  The same article claims that a 1PB MP3 at standard quality would play for 32 years.  This site claims that all the US research institutions combined would equal 2 PB.

In a effort to get my head around this, I did a little math.  0.001 PB is a Terabyte.  Terabytes are becoming more common these days and I think I’ve got a good grip on those.  I tend to thing in terms of DVDs.  Your average DVD is about 8 Gigabytes.  Therefore a Terabyte is about 125 DVDs and a Petabyte is 125 thousand.  That is about the same as every single movie made in the world between 1999 and 2007 (Source).

Side note: Despite all this fun, you might be asking “what the heck is a byte anyway?”  The answer is simple if you’re talking about text.  Open a new text document and type 1 character.  Save it and the file will be 1 byte large.  If you’re talking about images, movies or even word docs, there is no human equivalent – to explain we would need to talk about binary, hexadecimals, octets and other nonsense.  Stick with the text answer – 1 character = 1 byte.

The error message was obviously inaccurate.  There is no way that my game required 125 thousand dvds to install.  (If this happens to you, the most likely source was a zip file too large for Windows 7 to handle (5.7GB).)  However, despite the inaccuracy of my error message, the real point is this:  These numbers, strange and somewhat silly as they may be, are part of our lives now.  In my opinion, it’s worth taking a look around and questioning what they mean.

Of all the research I did to write this, this site did the best job of explaining the different terms.  Go check it out!  Also, if you really want to laugh at how geeky programmers are, check out the Wikipedia entry for a “nibble” (1/2 a byte… I’m not even kidding).

~ab

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 10:29 am and is filed under Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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