VFX Artist Reveals the TRUE Scale of Data!

it's insane that we can fit so much data onto  something small enough to eat this on the other   hand is a floppy disk or what some of you might  call the save button it holds 1.44 megabytes of   space but how many of these could equal this  well let me tell you well for one and a half   million dollars we acquired 700 happiness look how  glorious this deck is it's so tall I don't know   man this seems really unstable I think it might  fall I mean it might but you know what it's not   real we'll be fine come with me on a journey into  the past and the future as I use visual effects   and accurate math to show you something you've  never seen before the true scale of data no no no most of you are probably familiar with memory  cards we put them in our cameras to store the   photos and videos that we capture such as the  EOS r10 because this portion of the video is   sponsored by Canon are you a Creator looking  to up your game well guess what the Canon EOS   r10 is a pretty great camera Canon took the best  features of their R series and put them in a super   lightweight body like this dude so lightweight but  you're like ah this is 2022 I want high resolution   well guess what you get it this shoots 4K video  and if you're shooting photos 24.2 megapixel   Stills I got my own start in film using a Canon  camera a lot like this and this is so much better   for one thing the autofocus is lightning fast  you literally just like point at anything and   it's already focused before your brain even knows  what it happened it's a mirrorless camera and it   pairs so nicely with Canon RF lenses also this  thing will actually shoot for longer than 30   minutes I've been using these types of cameras for  long enough that like that's actually a big deal   if you are interested click that link down in the  description to check out the Canon EOS r10 thanks   to Canon again for sponsoring this portion of the  video but let's get back to the episode because I   want to show you my first memory card about 15  years ago I invested in a massive one gigabyte   memory card for my camera which was a big deal  back then for a kid like me however these days   if I saw one on the street next to a quarter I'll  be honest I'm probably more likely to pick up the   quarter the gig just doesn't really have much  value anymore it's hard for me to wrap my head   around the fact that although these are roughly  similar in size one holds a thousand times more   than the other I mean imagine showing this to a  computer scientist 60 years ago it'd blow their   minds a computer that can fit into a single room  and hold millions of pieces of information Jesus   the scale of just how big our data storage  has gotten is nearly impossible to imagine   it's that big so megabytes gigabytes you  probably already understand these terms but   do you know what a zettabyte is these terms  help us deal with huge numbers by putting   them into groups of a thousand so a thousand  bytes is a kilobyte a thousand kilobytes is   a megabyte a thousand megabytes is a gigabyte  thousand you get the idea but what's above this   well it goes petabyte then exabyte then zettabyte  which is a billion terabytes this is literally   incomprehensibly large but don't worry we'll  revisit zettabytes before this video is over it's   easy to take for granted that we stream pretty  much everything we want when we want it but that   wasn't always the case if you wanted to own movies  or music you needed this optical storage this is   a 4K Blu-ray which can hold 50 gigabytes per  disk so with only a small stack of 20 I have a   terabyte DVDs on the other hand they only hold  five gigabytes per disk so I need 212 of them   to do the same thing these hold the same amount  of data these two different Stacks here and yes   I know the Blu-rays are like black and the DVDs  are blue whatever I don't get it what about the   CD well at 700 megabytes per compact disc you end  up with a stack about as tall as a person oh this   is a lot heavier than it looks I'm sure some of  you've got like a whole terabytes worth of music   CDs stashed away in those little pocket binders  I know I'm looking at you oh gosh it's called   the compact disc truthfully I didn't realize  the CD first came out back in 1982. that was seven when they crossed 200 billion units sold  maybe it's just hard for my brain to accept that   a computer technology can be so integrated into  society without Ever Changing let's do a show   of hands how many of you have a CD player in your  car but as with all change it took a while for the   CD to actually like catch on in 1994 Bill Gates  advertised the value of the kind of brand new   but invented 12 years ago technology by sitting on  330 000 sheets of paper the idea is actually very   similar to this video he demonstrated you can  store thousands of books worth of information   in the palm of his hand look at all the paper  I'm saving says the guy literally wasting paper   the photo was taken 28 years ago so I think  it's time to update the comparison however   instead of holding a CD I'm gonna be holding a  one terabyte memory card so now the question is   how tall is the paper going to be well if  we assume Williams calculations are correct   a sheet of paper can hold 2.12 kilobytes of  information now I can easily afford the 470   million pages of paper but no one could  give me an answer on how to safely hold   me Steady at 26 kilometers altitude they said  it was like too dangerous or something stupid   like that man I was really looking forward to  chilling at the cruising altitude of the SR-71 so why was the CD such a big deal well it  marked the change to optical storage from   magnetic storage have you ever seen what's inside  of a floppy disk it's basically the same kind of   stuff as what's inside of VHS and cassette  tape because it stores data magnetically but   the data here is coiled into a spiral disk hence  floppy disk this is the form factor most of us   are familiar with but they actually started out  way larger and held way less and inside of these   hard plastic shells they were indeed floppy the  shells helped to prevent dirt from becoming a   problem 1.44 megabytes is all that these things  held that's not even enough to hold the average   amount of data a person generates every single  second during the space age of NASA scientists   had to get creative with how to store memory  they use these hand-woven bits of wire and   carbon Rings called core memory how did it work I  actually honestly have no idea hey I'm sorry I'm   a mechanical engineer not electrical but according  to Scott manlet it could fit a few terabytes worth   of core memory into the actual buildings used  to build Rockets this right here is a single   bit given to me by Adam Savage when I visited his  shop earlier this year it was invented for the IBM   604 a computer so Advanced it could do subtraction  plus multiplication and division state of the art   stuff back then a bit is the smallest form of data  possible it can only store on or off yes or no one   or zero it's binary which means to hold any useful  amount of information you need eight of them to   store a single byte this right here is just enough  Hardware to contain the information of a single   character of text we know that a sheet of paper  can hold a couple kilobytes of data at eight bits   per byte that means seventeen thousand bits can  hold the same information as this suddenly a piece   of paper seems pretty dang efficient huh but what  would a terabyte look like this is 8 trillion bits 74 years ago a terabyte was um challenging but  honestly these days it's kind of nothing I mean   our studio deals with hundreds of terabytes  in fact I think the server we have here at   Corridor is the biggest on YouTube uh maybe  not the biggest but we've all got to start   somewhere right oh okay yeah no that's pretty  big uh yeah I mean it isn't that big though not   that I'm jealous or anything a petabyte is just  one step above a terabyte so Linus's server is   really two and a half thousand terabytes  in size which I happen to have right here   now these are all 3D printed because my order of  two and a half thousand micro SD cards got lost in   the mail in theory though this is how big Linus's  server could be so Linus what are you doing man   wasting all that space come on this  is this is actually very satisfying fun fact though this is around the  same data capacity as our brains   seriously add up all the synapses it's about two  and a half petabytes so now I'm just wondering   why doesn't Linus use this as his server you're  actually not the first to think of using a pile   of commodity SD cards to build out a storage  array in fact we did a video about it four   and a half years ago unfortunately there are a  number of problems with this approach first and   foremost being that it's just not cost effective  a one terabyte SD card that's affordable enough   that large video productions would generally  consider them to be disposable a thousand of them   yeah not so much that's about nine times the  cost of a petabyte of traditional mechanical   hard drives a hard drive or even a regular SSD  will often begin spitting out errors weeks or   even months before it dies out right giving you  time to hopefully back up your data SD cards   well they just die and with a thousand plus of  these things you are pretty much guaranteed to   have regular failures and the maintenance that  goes along with them at that point why wouldn't   you just buy proper ssds or hard drives in  the first place right but we have all these   massive corporations creating dozens of massive  multi-billion dollar data centers to host all of   your content and this network of hard drives is  called the cloud here it is this is your future   but where's the fun in that I mean I bet they  save so much space with all these unfortunately   these companies are so secretive about their data  capacity they even hide the exact size and power   consumption of their data centers so we can't even  extrapolate how many hard drives they must have   John John I tried to hire someone to sneak into a  data center for me to find out but no apparently   that's illegal or whatever that means so no I  don't know exactly how many hard drives make   up the cloud of one of these companies however I  do think they're each in the ballpark of around   30 exabytes if they're not there now they will be  very soon trust me that's 30 000 petabytes or 30   million terabytes if they use micro SD cards they  could condense their entire cloud and to adjust   this see they're wasting so much space when they  could just have this and call it a day come on   guys if you need any help I've got extras okay it  wouldn't be a scale video if I didn't show you the   max What's the total amount of data storage in the  entire world again it's kind of a tricky number to   find there's a difference between the amount of  data being generated replicated and deleted and   the actual installed data capacity crazily enough  ninety percent of all data never ends up getting   saved but if you were to count up all of the  hard drives memory cards phones smart hot tubs   and everything else in 2022 we would end up with  10 zettabytes see I told you we'd come back to   zettabytes 10 zettabytes is 10 billion terabytes  and a billion is already such a huge number I made   a whole video about it so 10 billion memory  cards well it cost over one trillion dollars   and here it is 10 billion memory cards yeah that's  right they fit in a single tennis court that is   a lot of memory cards but I don't know I guess I  was just kind of expecting it to be a lot larger   after all this does hold the entire world's  data it's really a testament to how insanely   data dense memory cards have become it's almost  disappointing because I wanted something truly   gargantuan to show you but it's probably  a bad idea to get a little crazy isn't it   hell no it's not a bad idea that's right we're  going there I had to know the bits 80 billion   trillion of these could store everything  and it should be arriving right about now   this Celestial bit is so large that  its own gravity takes over collapsing   itself into a Mini Moon two and a half  thousand kilometers wide this thing is   four million times larger than the  asteroid that ended the dinosaurs a Planet Killer or a tennis court both contain the  same amount of information just in very different   ways it seems like we can't possibly get more  data dense than this but let's not forget the   ultimate data storage technology DNA because  a double helix strand of human DNA contains   215 petabytes of information but that's just  one we have 1.7 quadrillion strands of DNA   in our bodies you thought ten zettabytes  was big try 370 billion zettabytes that's   the data capacity we each carry with us every  day because we are the ultimate thumb drives   I think technology still has a long  way to go before beating biology   I hope thank you so much for watching  it feels great to be making these making these series for your  viewing convenience right here   I guess I'll see you next time when I  visualize the scale of nuclear explosion   but for now I'm going to get back to our  quarter digital live stream every month I'm back it holds 1.4 megabytes  of space so how many of oh

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 4,322,588

Keywords: scale, scale of data, wren weichman, science, math, data, data centers, computer data, education, Canon EOS R10, Canon camera, vlogging camera, creator camera, mirrorless camera, influencer camera, APC-S camera, VFX artist reveals, learn

Id: J-K2yeQylCk

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022