a bit of Geek storage talk

I was writing a friendly letter to my friend, and unexpectedly i wrote extra longer than i originaly thought, so i thought, it probably worth while to paste a copy here, so everyone can have a read. here it is

"... ... hotmail finally increased it's mailbox to 250MB after Yahoo's 100MB and Gmail's 1000GB. But i start to wonder, as Hotmail has how many hundred million user again, if it suddenly give everyone 250MB, say they have 100 million user, then it's 25 billion Mega Bytes, that is 25 million GB or 25 thousand TB or 25 PB (petabytes)

That's enourmous, they must have so many users. but one thing many say i have to reject. look at this:

Disk capacities double every year, and thus within a decade or so we will be seeing commodity 200 terabyte disks in home PC's. That is an enormous amount of data: by comparison, the entire contents of the United States Library of Congress requires something around a tenth of that, around 20 terabytes, give or take a few hundred gigs. (It's somewhat humbling to think that a person's lifework, say, the collected works of Shakespeare, can easily fit on a floppy disk.)

It is not quite true. some say before long, they can have stroage every single second of our life in a disk or something, let me just tell you it is defintely more than 20TB, don't belive me. let's do the calculation

say we are going to shoot our entire life in 2D (that is only require 1 Camera), let's not go HD which requires at least four times more than mini DV, why you think it's called mini. so let's calculate, say a person live to 80. 24*365*80=3293760 hours

and we need to times this by 4.7GB/HR which yield 15480672GB and how much is that, 15.5 PB. AND THIS IS ONLY 2D, Low Def. Imagine if every frame of your life is recorded in matrix style, you will need 36 ish high def camera shooting every frame, you need times 15.5 PB by 36 then by at least 4 which yield 2.2EB (EB - Exabye)

so you need 2.2EB roughly to record everything in matrix style 3D 'rotatable' video from your brith to death. you know how they describe exabyte.

5 exabyte - all words ever spoken by human being.

surely video takes much more than plain ascii.

i brought this up is because, so many people is trying to say, ah, 1TB, so many space, we'll never used it up. But it's quite untrue, even using conventional, contemparoy miniDV camera would easily eat up your 1TB in how long? say you are an amature, you shoot 10 hours a week. You can finish 1TB in 21 weeks.

if my calculation is absurd, let me know. ... ..."