Zettabytes of Storage
Total capacity of HDD shipped by the top three manufacturers reached an all-time high of 1 ZB in 2020. A zettabyte (ZB) is a billion terabytes or a trillion gigabytes or a quadrillion megabytes. In any case, it is mind blowing. And, what's more mind numbing: capacity requirements are expected to triple between now and 2026 to over 3 ZB annually. And, what's even more mind numbing is it only includes hard disk drives. Solid State Drives (SSD) adds another 20% to the capacity number. Do you remember the 1 GB hard drive in your 1995 PC? I remember it was the largest available HDD for home computers at the time. It would take a trillion of those disks to equal the capacity sold in 2020. Today's PCs and laptops seem to come standard with 1 TB hard drives. It takes a billion of them to equal the 1 ZB capacity sold in 2020 alone. And, repeat every year. Just imagine someone buying a billion 1 TB disks each year. Enterpri...