Seagate has published a new infographic, created by XO Communications, which claims that 2016 will be "the year of the Zettabyte". The storage firm seems to be rubbing its hands with glee while eyeing this predicted increase in data transfer and thus storage demands. It is predicted by Cisco that in 2016 "the world will cross the Zettabyte threshold of data transferred annually via the Internet."
A Zettabyte is a massive amount of 0s and 1s. XO's Infrographic explains that 1ZB could hold more than 323 trillion copies of War And Peace or 2 billion years worth of music files. TweakTown relates the capacity of a Zettabyte to the Terabyte, a very familiar measure in the desktop PC world; "1PB (Petabyte) is 1024TB (Terabyte), and 1EX (Exabyte) is 1024PB, so 1ZB is an insane 1024EB, which is just scary".
In related news late last week, HGST Taiwan and Shanghai general manager Vincent Chen talked about how much storage we are using, rather than how much data is being transferred over the internet, again using Zettabytes. Chen estimated that 4.4ZB (zettabytes) of data was stored globally in 2013.
Looking at the storage market, said to be experiencing a 44 per cent compound annual growth rate, Chen said that the global information storage capacity will increase to 447ZB by 2020.
HGST was also pleased with its projected storage demand increase figures. The firm reminded us that it has recently announced its 3.5-inch helium filled SMR drives which achieve up to 10TB capacities (as in the diagram above).
