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.

Since its release in 1981, the movie Silence of the Lambs has become a horror icon. The American Film Institute considers it one of the best films of all time, and it is only one of three movies to win the “big five” Academy Awards for Best Actor, Actress, Director, Movie, and Screenplay.

In a movie filled with terrifying moments, there is one that stands out. While investigating a storage facility, FBI Agent Clarice Starling finds a large jar that contains a human head. The gruesome sight horrified the agent, not to mention the audience.

While discovering a head in a jar might be the stuff of movies, finding human remains in storage units is not unrealistic. Dozens of such cases have happened around the world to people who never imagined seeing a tiny corpse stuffed into a suitcase or a military hero’s ashes on a shelf. From murders to thefts, accidents to suicides, gruesome crime scenes to sadly forgotten histories, storage units have many stories to tell. Here are ten of them.

Related: 10 Family Secrets That Will Truly Horrify You

10 Forgotten Children

The idea of finding something valuable in an abandoned storage unit has made TV shows like Storage Wars and Auction Hunters popular. In those shows, as in real life, if a storage unit goes unpaid or has been abandoned, the owners of the facility can auction off its contents. The bidders don’t know what they might find—it might be valuable art or jewelry; it might be nothing but empty boxes. And sometimes, as in a recent case in New Zealand, it might be something horrific.

On August 11, 2022, after trying their luck by bidding on abandoned storage items in an online auction, a family in Auckland brought home their unknown winnings. They hoped to find something of value. What they found instead, crammed into suitcases, were the remains of two young children, between roughly five and ten years of age.

Authorities were called to the scene, and investigators say the remains have likely been in the suitcases for several years. Although their names have not been released, the children have been identified. After a South Korean woman was linked to the victims, the Korean National Police Agency became involved in the ongoing investigation.^[1]

9 Cali in the Cage

In another horrific case involving a child, the remains of five-year-old Cali Anderson were found in a plastic drum in a Sacramento storage unit in May 2018. The police say Cali had died approximately two weeks before her body was discovered. In an arrest affidavit, Anderson’s stepmother said the little girl was experiencing health problems, but since she wasn’t her own child, she didn’t get her any medical attention.

When Cali died, her body was placed in a duffel bag, hidden in a closet, and finally moved to the storage unit. When the police investigated the child’s home, they found handcuffs in an animal crate, along with clothing belonging to the girl, hinting that little Cali’s short life had been a very tragic one.^[2]

8 No Show of Respect

While storage units have been used many times by killers trying to hide evidence, sometimes the remains are of people who died of completely natural causes. The crimes perpetrated against them and their families instead occurred after death by the very people trusted to handle their remains with dignity and care.

In one such case, the winner of a storage auction in Rhode Island was shocked to find the bodies of two adults and one infant in his unit. The remains of the adults were so decomposed their gender could not be determined, while the infant, found in a small coffin, was thought to be a female. The unit had been rented by funeral home operator Alfred Pennine of Providence. Dozens more sets of remains were discovered in the funeral home he operated. Once his crimes began to come to light, Pennine committed suicide.^[3]

7 A Long-Overdue Honor

In some cases, it is not criminal activity that results in human remains being found in storage but merely time and tragedy. In early 2022, storage auction winner Bob Blank stumbled across the story of a forgotten military veteran. While looking through items he had won from the auction, he found a sealed box with cremated remains, along with other documents, including a letter from former President Ronald Reagan. A death certificate and Army discharge documents said the remains belonged to a World War II veteran. Two medals indicated he had been a heroic one.

Decorated soldier George Ralph Brady died in 1984 at the age of 59, and his ashes were stored in a cardboard box for 38 years. Determining that Brady had no living relatives, the American Legion performed a burial service with an honor guard and a flag line. The once-forgotten veteran’s remains now lie at the Riverside National Cemetery in California.^[4]

6 Work Goes up in Flames

Although most people use storage units to secure their personal belongings, some also use them to work on their own property. Unfortunately for a man in Russellville, Alabama, doing repairs on an automobile might have been responsible for his death.

On January 14, 2022, emergency workers responded to a fire at a storage facility. Initial reports about the number of units involved varied, but they all claimed one thing: that a dead body was found inside one of them. Subsequent reports said the unnamed man was known to have rented several units in the facility and that he often worked on vehicles in them. Authorities speculate the victim might have been using an alternative heat source that could have sparked the blaze. No foul play was suspected.^[5]

5 Murderous Greed

Money has always been a powerful motivator for murder, and hiding a victim’s remains while continuing to rob them is not as rare as one would hope. In one such case in Las Vegas, the bodies of an elderly couple were hidden in trash bins for ten years while their killer stole their Social Security income. The remains were found in a unit at All Storage at the Lakes in 2015, but the last time Joaquin and Eleanor Sierra were seen alive was in 2003.

Their killer, Robert Dixon Dunn, had apparently met them at a nursing home where his own mother was living. After killing them, he succeeded in stealing from them for all those years by moving around the country and using a fake name. After someone reported him for suspected fraud, he was finally caught. His ex-wife said Dunn claimed he was concealing the bodies of his aunt and uncle, who had committed suicide. In truth, the bodies were found to contain drugs and injuries caused by a sharp object.^[1]

4 A Bug Reveals All

That lure of money does not just attract evil strangers to potential victims. Violence within families is not uncommon, sometimes between spouses or between siblings. And sometimes between parents and children. In 2001, police in Las Vegas accused Brookey Lee West of killing her own mother and hiding the remains in a trash can in a storage unit. The remains of Christine Smith, 68, were discovered after reports of a foul odor caused the police to seek a search warrant.

The unit, which also contained many of Smith’s belongings, had been rented by her daughter, though she had used a different last name. During the trial, it seemed possible the murderer might evade justice because the remains were so decomposed that the coroner could not determine a cause of death. West said her mother died of natural causes, and the coroner could not absolutely refute that. But in a surprising twist, an entomologist was able to prove the case for murder. Dr. Neal Haskell testified that the absence of blow flies on the corpse proved she had been put in the can either while she was still alive or immediately after death. West was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

In an interesting footnote, Brookey Lee West returned to the headlines when she tried to escape from prison. Although wearing a disguise, West was spotted and recognized by staff right before she reached the prison exit.^[7]

3 A Daughter’s Deceptive Plan

Even when murder is not involved, the lure of money can cause some people to do unimaginable things. After her father apparently died from natural causes in June 1990, Judith Maria Broughton concocted a plan to steal his Social Security benefits, beginning in 1997. Leasing a storage unit at Econo Self Storage in Lexington, Kentucky, Judith stored the body there and kept collecting her father’s retirement funds.

On January 8, 2014, authorities discovered the mummified remains of Luther Broughton and charged Judith with the theft of nearly a quarter-million dollars. After pleading guilty to the theft, Judith was sentenced to ten years in prison.^[8]

2 Horrific Hoarding

It’s not always murder, and it’s not always money. Sometimes remains discovered in storage units were kept there due to family secrets, psychological disorders, and grief. After her death by natural causes in 1995, Ann Bunch’s body was released to her family for burial. Family members built a casket, domed so the old woman’s hump would fit inside. It was painted blue and loaded into a family van to be transported to Alabama for burial. But the body never got there.

On her deathbed, Ann’s daughter, Barbie Hancock, confessed to her own daughter, Rebecca Fancher, that the remains were in unit B8 of U-Stor. Although Hancock claimed the burial had been delayed because of bad weather and truck problems, family members say otherwise. Fancher’s ex-husband claims his former mother-in-law couldn’t deal with her mother’s death and that her hoarding compulsion made her keep the body nearby—possibly even in her own home before it was moved to U-Stor. Hancock and Fancher’s hoarding eventually led to their house being declared uninhabitable.^[9]

1 A Wife Dismembered

One of the most disturbing instances of remains found in a storage unit would have to be the case of Jessica Rey. On October 20, 2017, Rey gave birth in a Kansas City, Missouri, hotel room. Her husband, Justin, claims she died after the child’s birth, saying at one time that she had committed suicide and at another that Jessica died of natural causes. In any case, Justin spent two days in the room with the corpse, the newborn infant, and the couple’s toddler. Then, in the presence of his children, he dismembered Jessica’s body, put the parts in a cooler, and took it to a U-Haul storage facility. Alarmed by his suspicious behavior, facility workers called the police.

Authorities found Rey in the storage unit—where he might have stayed for a few nights—with his two small children and his wife’s dismembered remains. Faced with charges of endangerment of a child and sexual exploitation of a minor for photos found on his phone during the investigation, Rey was convicted and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison. He remains under investigation in a separate murder case in California.^[10]