You should keep in mind that megabyte, gigabyte and terabyte scale is insufficient. These two units of measurement are the measurements we use on a daily basis at the user level. When we go to the Internet level, things change a lot.
put numbers on the internet
Nail Photography with our smartphone can occupy 4-5 MB on average in our terminal. THE video games can occupy between 10-200 GBdepending on the game. While the SSD around the 1-4TB of capacity and the Hard disk until the 22TB. Let’s say these are the standard measurements of our daily lives.
In fact, it’s impossible to say for sure how much the whole internet weighs. The first reason is that it is very difficult to know how much data is downloaded per day. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or Twitch could provide us with daily data on the amount of data uploaded. But on the Internet there are millions of different web pages and collecting all the data is not possible.
According to Rancounter, he tried to make a rough estimate and they captured it in an infographic. They point out that for 2025It is estimated that each day some will be generated 463 exabytes of data.
Most likely, you will have no idea what an Exabyte is, but we will clarify it for you. Specifically, 1 exabyte equals 1,000,000 terabytes. Yes, we are not mistaken, 1 Exabyte is equal to 1 million Terabytes. So, by 2025, the Internet will grow by 463 million terabytes every day.
Currently, the largest mechanical hard drives (HDDs) available on the market are the WD Red Pro 22TB (about 800 dollars) and the WD UltraStar DC HC570 22TB (about 540 dollars). Seagate offer the IronWolf Pro 20TB (about 540 dollars) and the Exos X20 20TB (about 420 dollars).
Concretely, every day we would need 21 to 23.15 million hard drives, which is bullshit. Let’s say that on average each unit costs us around 400 dollars since we buy them in bulk from the manufacturer. This means that daily it would cost us between 8,400 and 9,260 million dollars
It’s not worth putting it away
The “easy” part is to save all that data, so to speak. This becomes more complicated if we take into account that none of the data can be lost. All our posts on Twitter must always be available, Instagram photos or YouTube videos. Nothing can be erased or simply disappear.
This is where it gets complicated, since you have to back up data. This is not valid with a simple RAID 1 (store each data on two different hard disks) specific configurations are necessary. To understand and simplify it, Ibai’s latest video from his YouTube channel is stored on at least 5 different hard drives. Be careful, it doesn’t only happen with his videos, it happens with each of the videos. Then add comments, likes, and other data associated with each video.
That would be the previous numbers multiplied by 5, resulting in even more absurd numbers. But, there is a trick to make all those absurd numbers more “normal”
You have to compress each data, well, compress it
Obviously, spending around 9,000 million dollars on hard drives a day is nonsense. This would be double with other associated expenses. Moreover, it is impossible for Seagate, WD and Toshiba (currently the only hard drive manufacturers) to provide you with so many hard drives per day.
Imagine that today only 4 exabytes of data are generated, or 200,000 20 TB hard drives. By the end of the year, there would be 73 million hard drives. There are not enough materials on earth to produce them, impossible.
So the data is deleted every day? Well no, the solution is much simpler: they are compressed. There are specific algorithms that allow all this data to be compressed so much that it only takes up a fraction. It would be like having a high force hydraulic press.
By using special encryption algorithms, a 4MB photo can be reduced to a few KB (1MB = 1000KB). This compression saves the acquisition of many hard drives, saving millions of dollars.
