How much memory do you have on your phone? An iPhone can have anywhere from a “bare bones” 64 GB to as much as a terabyte. Do you have an external hard drive for your gaming console? If so, it’s probably got at least a terabyte or two, right? And to think, if you bought a computer in 1995 it probably had around 12 MB of RAM and a hard drive of between 500 MB and a whole gigabyte. Memory has come a long way, and it offers a lot.
Dropbox currently offers you a terabyte of storage and translates that into practical terms. One terabyte is good for about 250 full movies. Or as much as 6.5 million pages of text. So with that in mind, let’s look at some memory figures.
10. The Human Mind May Be Able to Store Petabytes of Data
Computer memory is most easily likened to our own memories, that’s why we use the same word. Your brain can hold information and so can a computer hard drive. It’s only natural to want to compare the two.
While a computer hard drive is pretty compact, it’s not like your brain is a vast expanse of material, either. But it has to be able to hold everything you can ever know. Everything you’ve experienced is in there, all the people you’ve met, things you’ve learned, recipes you’ve mastered, stupid movie quotes, random song lyrics, it’s all in there. So how much memory does a brain hold?
No one can say with accuracy exactly how much data your brain holds because, of course, your brain doesn’t work exactly like a computer. But it’s close enough that we can have some fun speculating, especially if you’re a computational neuroscientist and this is how you literally consider brain function.
Guesses for how much data a human brain can store range from a paltry one terabyte to a staggering 2.5 petabytes. We haven’t touched on petabytes yet and they are what come after terabytes. If a terabyte is 250 movies, and a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and a petabyte can hold 250,000 movies. Of course, you need to multiply that by 2.5 so it’s 625,000 full movies worth of storage. Or 16,250,000,000 pages of text. Decide for yourself if your brain can manage that.
A few years after those initial estimates, researchers tried to narrow the range down and suggested a human brain could handle about one petabyte of information. To give that some non-movie context, that was about the size of all the information available on the internet in 2016 when the data was presented.
9. You’d Need Unbelievable Space to Store a Yottabyte
A petabyte sounds big as hell if it’s all the internet or the equivalent of a lifetime of knowledge all crammed in the meatball inside your skull but it’s not the end of the line by any means. Numbers don’t end and the metric system dares not stop at peta, oh no. Have you ever heard of a yottabyte?
Yottabytes are well beyond petabytes. After petabyte comes exabyte, and then zettabyte, and then yottabytes. It’s the largest size that has been acknowledged so far by the International System of Units and represents one quadrillion gigabytes.
Data has to exist somewhere and if there was a yottabyte worth of data in the world, which there isn’t, you’d have to put it on hard drives. Those hard drives, to accommodate that information, would cover a space of both Delaware and Rhode Island. You’d need a full million data centers to handle it all.
8. 278,000 Petabytes of Traffic Flowed Through the Internet Per Month in 2021
Any time you’re online streaming content, reading social media posts, or doing whatever it is you do, have you ever wondered how many other people are doing the same thing? Or, more specifically, have you ever wondered how much information is flowing through those internet tubes all the time? The short answer is that it’s a lot.
Global internet traffic, which is all the internet activity in the world, in a given month, was estimated to be about 278,108 petabytes per month in 2021. In 2016 it was only 96,054. Elsewhere, it was predicted in 2022 that global traffic would surpass a more modest 150.7 exabytes per month in 2023, or 150,700 petabytes.
7. It Would Take 500,000 Terabytes of Data to Map a Mouse’s Brain
We touched on how much info your brain might be able to store in it, but what if we wanted to map your brain? That’s a little more complex a question to answer than you might think. Mapping your brain means understanding all the neurons, all the synapses, all those hundreds of billions of connections that are needed to make it work the way it works. To map all of that would take a hell of a lot of time and data.
Neuroscientists would love to map a human brain but it’s a tall order. It’s been estimated that, aside from the complexity of just pulling such a thing off, storing the information mapped would require about 1.3 billion terabytes of storage space.
To at least broach the idea of mapping a human brain, researchers have looked at a smaller scale. Mouse brains are not as complex as humans though make no mistake they are still incredibly complicated. But mapping a mouse brain would take a lot less, at least.
Researchers are starting their task with a section of mouse brain, a tiny 10-square-millimeter segment. They expect mapping that small bit will take 10,000 terabytes of data. They’d need 50 times more, or 500,000 terabytes, for the full mouse brain.
If the plan works as expected, all the data will show exactly how the brain works, and how all of those neurons function together to create a living, working brain.
6. In 1980, a 1 GB Hard Drive Weighed Over 500 Pounds
In your lifetime you have probably noticed how technology gets smaller as it gets more efficient. A desktop computer in the 80s barely had a fraction of the computer power that the phone you keep in your pocket holds. Memory condenses as technology improves and we can get a lot in a small space, something that keeps getting better and better with each passing year. Many people alive today have no idea what it was like forty years ago.
In 1980, IBM created a one GB hard drive. Today, a storage drive that only holds one gigabyte of data is all but useless to most people. You can store a good amount of text there, or some sound files, but you can’t fit a movie in a space that small and they haven’t made smartphones with so little memory in years. Amazon will sell you 50 one GB flash drives for just over $75, though.
That one GB drive, when it debuted, cost $40,000. It weighed 550 pounds and was the size of a typical refrigerator. One of those 50 you can buy on Amazon will fit on your keychain. And, for the cost of the one from the 80s, you can buy over 26,600 of them.
5. Data on Star Trek Has Less Storage Capacity Than Modern Supercomputers
When it comes to computers vs brains, artificial intelligence has to fit into the mix somewhere. And not the fake AI we have now which is just glorified text modeling, real AI. A computer that is alive and can think. So fiction, basically. Like Commander Data from Star Trek.
On the show, Data is essentially a computer in the form of a man that is capable of independent thought and understanding. He is self aware and, early in the show’s run, an episode establishes that he is alive, sentient, and not property.
While establishing Data’s bona fides, his specs are also listed. The show was actually careful to not address a lot of specific technology about Data, especially later on, because the writers knew that what they thought was futuristic would quickly become outdated. But they still took the time to let us know Data’s storage capacity is 800 quadrillion bits. That sounds mildly impressive, but that breaks down to around 100,000 terabytes or 100 petabytes.
100 petabytes is still remarkable, and it’s better than whatever device you’re looking at this on, but it’s not super futuristic anymore like it was back when that episode aired in 1989. The supercomputer called Aurora, which exists right here in the present, has a capacity of 220 petabytes. It’s already surpassed Data, it just hasn’t achieved sentience yet. That we know of.
4. The Fastest Internet Ever Recorded Was More Than 7 Million Times Faster Than Average
Memory is important for any computer but so is speed. Who cares if you can store 1,000 movies if you have dial-up internet? Hey, remember dial-up? Speed is key to transmitting large amounts of data. In the US, the average internet speed is 219 Mbps download and 24 Mbps upload. 25 is considered fast, at least by the FCC, and basic is between three and 8.
You may think 25 is not fast at all and you’re right, it’s not. It’s not even close. The fastest internet ever recorded was 319. And that wasn’t Mbps or even a basically unheard-of Gbps which you can only get with some good quality fiber service. That was Tbps—319 terabits per second.
Japanese researchers broke the speed record in 2021 with a cutting-edge four-core optical cable. It’s so fast that, if you had it at home, you could download 80,000 movies in one second.
3. Frontier is the Most Powerful Computer Ever Built
We’ve covered a lot about memory, storage capacity, and even mentioned one supercomputer. But what is the best of all the supercomputers and what can it do? That would be Frontier, the current (but possibly replaced by the time you stumble on this list) most powerful supercomputer in history. It will always have a place in history as being the first exascale computer ever built. That means it can perform over one quintillion operations per second.
How does it do so much? It weighs nearly 270 tons, uses over 40,000 processors, and consumes more power than 15,000 houses.
2. Synthetic DNA Could Have 215 Petabytes of Storage Per Gram
As our ability to create more efficient storage increases, so too does the innovation in how it’s made. In recent years, the idea of using synthetic DNA as data storage has become more prevalent, in a theoretical sense. DNA holds all the information that makes up living things, after all, and it does so in microscopic packages. Lots of info, tiny space. It’s what computer dreams are made of.
If we could make synthetic DNA storage, it’s been estimated we could store as much as 215 petabytes of information in just a single gram of the stuff.
As cool as it sounds, there are a couple of major drawbacks. One is that it takes a lot of time to read and write information to DNA storage. As in hours. No one wants to wait hours to save a file. But worse than that is cost. MIT once estimated that storing a single petabyte of data to DNA storage would cost about $1 trillion.
1. Everything Ever Spoken Would Fill 5 Exabytes
We use outlandish examples of what data or memory represents to try to make it understandable. No one knows what a terabyte is when you just say terabyte. It’s a concept. But if you say it represents 250 movies, that makes it easier to relate to. Because you’re playing with ideas and concepts that represent big, monumental things, you can have some fun with it. You can get bigger.
How much memory would you need to record everything you have ever said in your life? It’s got to be a lot, right? But that’s still not big enough. What if we wanted to document everything anyone has ever said? Every word spoken in every language by every person who ever lived in the history of our species. How much would that be? Best guess is 5 exabytes.
About 117 billion people have lived throughout history. At least one writer calculated that the average person, in their life, will speak 860.3 million words. Do the math on that and it’s a lot of words.