Jesus.
Tencent, the parent company to Weibo (China’s largest chat app), is offering 10 terabytes of storage to their users. That sounds incredible! Amazing! Wondrous!
But I can’t even picture how much 10 terabytes really is…
So of course, I Googled and found some handy pictorial on Neatorama from like, 2008. They charted how much 12 terabytes is worth, which is close enough… I guess.
Behold. This, is 12 terabytes:
It’s nice to visualize, but it’s still hard to really picture (or maybe I’m just stupid?) and upon even further Googling, I came across more examples.
10 terabytes = 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 300 hours of good quality video. All of the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress = ‘155.3 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. 35 million books and other print materials, 3.4 million recordings, 13.6 millioni photographs, 5.4 million maps, 6.5 million pieces of sheet music and 68 million manuscripts.
Um. What? 838 miles, is approximately the distance from NYC to Disney World. A little more than San Francisco to Vancouver — CANADA. From Mongolia to Kazakhstan (Borat) and it’s like climbing The Great Smokey Mountains. Either which way, that is a lot of frickin’ stuff on a lot of frickin’ mileage. It’s still a bit unclear to me how much 10 terabytes really is and how it makes my life easier.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t LOTS OF STORAGE! a bit backwards…? I mean… in the age of streaming, why would I even want to store all that data? Googling is so much faster and easier. I can find movies and songs, TV shows, reference books, dictionaries, thesauruses… what would I even do with all that storage space?
Maybe my digital habits are bit different because I long ago stopped being an Internet pack rat — I’m all about constantly organizing and discarding.
I’d rather have less storage room with more bandwidth to upload. The CAPd data message: “File upload failed, file too large.” always bums me out.
Any which way, looking forward to seeing how Tencent does.