'how much' is a petabyte?
Last week I quoted a footnote to this post trying to convey the size of an exabyte:
"an exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1018 bytes - there 1024 petabytes in an exabyte or 1,073,741,824 gigabytes in an exabyte. To give you an idea of what this means, five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections."
So there are 1024 petabytes in an exabyte. But 'how much' is a petabyte? Jonathan Schwartz has provided a nice post giving us an idea of its muchness:
"A petabyte is a thousand terabytes, which is a million gigabytes, or a billion megabytes. Or 8 billion megabits. With me so far?
So if you had a half megabit per second internet connection, which is relatively high in the US (relatively low compared to residential bandwidth available in, say, Korea), it'd take you 16 billion seconds, or 266 million minutes, or 507 years to transmit the data. Can you sail to Hong Kong faster than that? At a full megabit, just divide the time in half. Even at a hundred megabits (about the highest, generally available, of any carrier I've seen), it's a few years."