Quote of the day;

(Note that "ZB" refers to a "zetabyte", which is roughly a thousand exabytes, or a million petabytes, or a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. I'm sure someone should work it out in a more commonly used term, such as "Library of Congress"es.)

“ “By the way, how many hours (days?) of Pr0n could be held by 1 ZB?”

Years, my friend. Years.”

(Courtesy Zamwi.com.)

This does bring up a fairly interesting point; storage capacities are constantly increasing, yet what are we creating that is worth filling the space with? Every document ever written wouldn't make much of a dent in a zetabyte of storage space, nor would every song ever recorded. Every episode of Cheers? Google's entire index (effectively, a copy of every web page that it searches) is only a few petabytes, a few hundred thousand orders of magnitude smaller than a zetabyte. An hour of good quality video can be compressed into about a gigabyte of space, so a zetabyte would give us a trillion hours, or just over a hundred and ten million years. What on earth would be the purpose of holding onto a million century's worth of video?

Of course, we could record - and watch - everything is the highest possible quality. The maximum perceptible resolution of the human eye is about 1/60th of a degree, so assuming that we can see 180 degrees both horizontally and vertically, this gives us 116,640,000 points that the human eye can distinguish (that's roughly a one hundred megapixel camera).

Looking at the storage required for an image that size, simply multiply by three (for the red, green and blue channels), then multiply by 32 bits per pixel, for a grand total of around 1.3 gigabytes per image.

At, say, sixty frames per second, our zetabyte storage system can still hold about four hundred years of video (allowing a bit for the audio track). This level of quality is absurd, of course, but it'll be interesting to see at what point we simply stop worrying about storage. Or perhaps we'll find something else entirely to put there?

Bear in mind, of course, that such a system has not - and probably will never - be built. The article simply talks about the development of software that could handle a system of such magnitude. The largest hard disks currently available top out at around five hundred gigabytes, barely enough for a few seconds of our ultra-high-definition recording. "Regular" high definition, however, runs at about ten gigabytes an hour, giving us a fairly reasonable fifty hours of film. A respectible three weeks of regular DVD-quality video (at a paltry one gigabyte per hour) can be stored on these drives. I remember - some years ago - admiring a friend's mp3 collection, observing that his thirty gigabytes of music could run non-stop for three weeks without repeating a track. At the time I couldn't imagine the need for such an amount of music in one place, let alone in your pocket.

As an aside, it increasingly seems that there is less of a need for local storage; My email, photos, journals, bookmarks, favourite videos, and other assorted documents are all stored on some web service, and accessed via a web browser. I'm sure there'll always be a need for fast local storage, but lord knows I trust Google with my photo collection far more than I trust myself. Who knows; perhaps one day we'll just have a wireless internet connection in our pocket, and a world of movies and music at our fingertips.