One of the most frontline technologies to thrust the development of all disciplines of life is undoubtedly the Internet. If you think about it, everyone is influenced by it one way or the other that makes it omnipresent yet ubiquitous. Have you ever wondered about the physical space of this magical internet? Probably never!
According to a report by Insider in 2016, there is an estimated data of 3.77 zettabytes. How much physical space would it take? Considering the size of data centers owned by the tech giants, one would imagine that it would be ‘A Lot.’ But, the reality may surprise you. Let us see!
To store an entire bulk of information present on the internet, we would need some hard drives. The three major hard drive producers shipped around 468.9 million hard drives in 2015, claims Seagate and Western Digital. The estimates suggest that somewhere around 650 million hard drives are produced worldwide. Using Randall Monroe’s logic, if the size of this drive is 3.5 inches, we would need 2 gallons of hard drives per second.
The storage capacity of the world has increased in parallel if not equal to the amount of information produced around the globe. Hence, it may be safe to say that the information-filled hard drives would fill an oil tanker at best.
Simply put, the internet is smaller than an oil tanker. Do you have some other theory or opinion? Comment right away!
