According to Larry Swezey from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the IT industry is moving from the “Information Age” established in 1971 to the current, newly coined “Tera Era”. In the beginning of the Information Age hard drives had a capacity of one gig, and temporary storage (floppies) could be measured in kilo- and megabytes. Since then, how we view, use and store data has changed dramatically. Thanks to the internet and data storage evolution, we have come to expect more data, more quickly and with an array of features, preferably video, but audio will do. Never before have so many people had so much data at their fingertips, and our digital universe just keeps on expanding.

Swezey believes that there are three Cs that intersect at the centre of this data growth phenomenon: Culture, Capacity and Content, and that their collision will create a new world view of data. One consequence of which is a change in language, for instance, we will say goodbye to the gigabyte and make terabyte an IT language staple.

A terabyte is 1000GB, which, is enormous. To provide a little perspective, Swezey cites some findings by IDC, a leading market intelligence and research firm. IDC estimates that the volume of digital data in the world is around 2.81 exabytes (EB), which is 2.81 million terabytes (TB), and that was in 2007. Going by volume, 2.81 million TB is bigger than the number of stars in the universe. And if your jaw isn’t on the floor yet, IDC pulls another staggering statistic out of the bag: the amount of digital data in the world will grow by a factor of 10 every five years, which means that in 15 years time, there will be more data on Earth than there are atoms in the universe.

Swezey provides all sorts of practical examples that show how all of these big number are possible (Gmail and Hotmail have a lot to do with it), but the really cool thing about his article is not the mind-numbing figures, it’s the fact that all of these fantastic data changes are occurring here and now. They are tangible and present, and not projected for some distant point in the future. For example, last year, Hitachi released the world’s first terabyte hard drive. Hitachi has also developed new nanotechnology which could potentially enable storage capacity to grow all the way up to 4TB on desktop PCs and 1TB for laptops. Terabytes in home computers; that’s a long way from the wow-factor of the gig in the early 80s.

Recommended sites:

http://www.wwpi.com/network-storage/6146-its-happening-now-this-is-the-tera-era-of-data-storage

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.61eaa3251e1db9d910441762eac4f0a0/