New study finds data growing at 23% per year
295 exabytes. That’s a lot of data being stored, according to a new study from the University of Southern California and published in Science Express, an electronic journal.
From looking at both digital and analog devices, the study concluded 295 exabytes of information are stored. In 2002, digital storage overtook analog capacity and in 2007, almost 95% of data is now in digital form.
Ultimate hoarding: Study finds mankind could store 295 exabytes of data
Over 1.9 zettabytes of information was sent through televisions and GPS, the equivalent of one person reading 174 newspapers every day.
Cell phones accounted for 65 exabytes of information and in 2007 computers computed 6.4 x 10 to the 18th power of instructions per second. If this computation had to be done by hand, it would take 2,200 times the period since the Big Bang (approximately 13.7 billion years ago.)
Compute capacity grew 58% per year between 1986 and 2007 and telecommunications grew 28% annually. Storage capacity grew 23% each year.
According to the study, a person would need to chat for two months and three weeks nonstop to communicate the information that the average person telecommunicates through multimedia content in one day only.
The study is in accordance with results from EMC and IDC, which found that
the global hardware capacity of digital information in 2007 was 264 exabytes.
A copy of the study can be viewed and a video about the research is available.
