As digital devices proliferate, we’re needing more and more room to store our stuff.
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It wasn’t the most imaginative Christmas present for a family member. But the two-terabyte hard drive I picked up in a pre-Christmas sale for $99 is already partially filled with photos and videos, digital fragments that might otherwise have been lost when the ageing computer they were stored on gave out.
Digital storage is cheap these days, which is just as well. The world is estimated to have generated 1.8 zettabytes of data in 2011. That’s right, we are now in the era of the zettabyte (a billion terabytes). To give you an idea of just how much data that is, 1.8 zettabytes is equivalent to 200 billion two-hour high-definition movies. Or to put it another way, it would take 57.5 billion 32 gigabyte iPads to store that much information.
By 2015 we will collectively be creating – and replicating – close to eight zettabytes of data a year. There are now thought to be more internet-connected devices than people in the world. Data traffic generated by mobile devices alone grows about 80% a year, and by the end of this year, video will be half of consumer internet traffic.
The data explosion accompanying the proliferation of digital devices has called for a huge amount of behind-the-scenes work to stop us running out of disk space. Data hosts such as Google, Amazon and Apple have billions invested in data warehouses around the world, in many cases building their digital vaults close to power stations and tier-1 fibre-optic cable routes to ensure the fastest and most reliable possible access to the data stored within.
By 2015, the companies that own these data centres will be responsible for storing about 85% of the data we create and send to the “cloud” – a major undertaking on their part and requiring a good deal of trust on ours. Cloud computing is revolutionising digital storage. Your music can be streamed from the cloud. Images stored online in Flickr can be displayed as a slideshow on your computer, phone or TV, without residing on any of them. Your letters and documents created in Google Docs sit on a server somewhere in North America waiting for you to access them.
Not only will that mountain of data created each year grow in size, but much of it will be duplicated as it is sent to the cloud and your other synced devices. Also, every megabyte of data you create as an individual is matched by a megabyte of “shadow data”. That includes activity logs, web search records and digital forms you fill out online, collected and archived by the companies, institutions and governments we deal with.
Still, despite the power of the cloud, there’ll always be a need for so-called local storage. But that hard disk drive I gave is already on the road to obsolescence. Solid-state drives that store data on a computer chip – the equivalent of the flash card in your camera – are now favoured over hard drives, even if they are still more expensive.
Solid-state drives use an electrical charge to store data, rather than the magnetism employed by hard drives. They use less power, preserving battery life in laptops and phones, and data can be written to and read from them more quickly. But even as we progress to solid-state drives, the search is under way for their successor, with scientists using cutting-edge techniques in nanotechnology and optical networking to come up with faster, more flexible storage systems that are lighter, tougher and use less power.
For instance, IBM is betting on its “racetrack memory”, which stores data on magnetised regions of nanowires spread across slivers of silicon. Imagine a city of skyscrapers, where high-speed elevators flit about carrying messages vertically between floors and horizontally between buildings. That’s what IBM has in mind, only the skyscrapers are the size of atoms.
IBM estimates a racetrack memory-equipped mobile could store up to 100 times the data of today’s devices. Think of that – 500,000 songs, or 3500 full-length movies, on your phone. Regardless of how digital content is stored in future, one thing is certain: we are going to need ever more space as the zettabytes pile up.
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