Storage 2000.

Been there. Done that.

As we mark the end of the twentieth century, let's pause to observe and reflect on the birth and growth of the information age and, in particular, the computer data storage industry. If we don't take a moment now, we may never have another chance to catch our breath, as the rate of change our industry is about to go through as the next century begins will quickly eclipse that of the past fifty years. In this article, we will look at some interesting "then" and "now" comparisons, along with some other "factoids" that have marked the astonishing progress of data storage and related fields.

What's In A Square Inch On Magnetic Disk?

* The first disk drive contained 5MB on a 24 inch diameter platter when it was delivered in 1956, the Ramac 350. Today's largest capacity disk contains 47GB, or a capacity 9,400 times greater.

* If the recording density of the Ramac were still used today, it would take a disk surface slightly larger than six NBA basketball courts to contain 47GB, which is the capacity of today's largest 5.25-inch diameter disk drive.

* A human thumbnail averages about .4 square inches in area. The latest laboratory disk areal density advancements have yielded an areal density of 35.3Gbit per square inch up from just over 2OGbit per square inch this time last year. At this density, a magnetic disk surface the size of a human thumbnail could contain 14.l2Gbit or 1.412GB. This equates to the equivalent of nearly fourteen sets of an average encyclopedia having an average digital size of approximately 100MB each or roughly 23 dictionaries having an average digital capacity of 60MB each. An area of disk the size of a child's thumbnail can hold about four dictionaries at today's magnetic densities.

* Each square inch of disk space can hold about three hours and 15 minutes of MPEG-2 compressed video, the equivalent of two full-length movies or about 77 hours of MP3 compressed video using lossy-compression techniques.

* A square inch of disk space can hold the equivalent of 2,187,500 sheets of double-spaced 8.5 inch by 11 inch typewritten paper. This would stack nearly 730 feet tall and, lying end-to-end, would stretch 380 miles, farther than the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

How Big Is A Terabyte On Paper?

* 1TB (1,000GB) of text on paper would consume approximately 42,500 trees. Assuming twelve characters of text per inch, 1TB of data in a straight line would circle the earth 56 times, stretching a distance of 1.4 million miles. This would equal nearly three round trips from the Earth to the Moon. Most paper is still printed on a single-sided copy.

* It is estimated that printing increases nearly 40% in an office where e-mail has been introduced.

* At least 1.2 trillion sheets of paper are expected to be consumed by laser printers and 1.1 trillion sheets of paper are expected to be used by office copiers worldwide in the year 2001.

* The United States Library of Congress is estimated to require 18TB of digital storage to hold its contents. This would equate to 765,000 trees to produce enough paper to store its contents.

* A four-drawer file cabinet can hold up to 800MB of data, based on type size and double-sided printing.

Comparing Tape Technology, Then And Now

The first storage medium for computers was the punched card containing eighty characters of data. In 1952, IBM was producing 16 billion punched cards per year. In 1952, the first magnetic tape drive, the IBM 726, replaced punched cards as the principal storage medium for large data files. Magnetic tape technology has seen a considerable increase of function and capacity, though not on nearly the steady evolutionary path as magnetic disks. Some of the highlights of magnetic tape progress follows:

* The first tape drives implemented a 7-track recording format on an eight-inch diameter reel and had a linear recording density of 100 bits per inch and had a capacity of 1MB or the equivalent of 12,500 punched cards.

* Using a native capacity of 100GB per cartridge, today's tape cartridges hold 100,000 times more capacity than the first tape reel.

* Today's latest magnetic tape technologies are targeting 100GB (uncompressed) capacity per cartridge on as many as 384 recording tracks using up to 2,000 feet of thin tape in a single cartridge.

* The Ultrium format of LTO (Linear tape Open) tape has specified a native capacity of 800GB in its fourth generation product roadmap. At a tape compression ratio of 3 to 1, this cartridge would contain 2.4TB of data or the equivalent capacity of two of StorageTek's original Nearline libraries (1988) when each library (Silo) contained 6,000 cartridges with a capacity of 200MB each. Thus, the capacity of 12,000 non-compressed tape cartridges in 1988 could fit in one compressed LTO Ultrium fourth generation cartridge in the future, a volumetric efficiency increase of 12,000 times!

Other selected observations about storage and Information Technology from a variety of publications, market research data and private sources include:

* Today, over 50% of the world's data are born digital, not on paper, fiche, charts, films, or maps, meaning that its first occurrence is in a computer-generated format. Estimates have this number reaching 85% by 2010.

* From the digital data explosion are estimates that 28% of today's data is created and read only once.

* It is faster to move two or more TB of data from New York to San Diego by airplane than on a single Fibre Channel at 100MB/sec. Fibre Channel is faster for amounts less than 2TB.

* A yottabyte, the largest defined capacity measurement, is equal to 10 to the 24th (a septillion) power. A terabyte is 10 to the 12th power. The largest denomination above one million is the centillion, equal to 10 to the 303rd power.

* All of the estimated 81.8 billion minutes (or 56,805,556 days) that were carried across the world's public telephone network in 1997 can now be transmitted over a single high-speed optical fiber in approximately eleven days. Private network minutes are not accounted for.

* There are now over 1,000 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) worldwide.

* Ninety-four percent of the most visited websites in the world are in the United States and forty percent are in California.

* The average number of e-mail messages sent on an average day in the United States was 300 million in 1995 and will be about 3.5 billion this year. Estimates for e-mail traffic are expected to exceed 8 billion by year-end 2002. Fifteen years ago, the Internet had only 1,000 host computers.

* China has about 4 million web users today and expects this number to be 27 million by 2001. Mexico has just over 1 million people with web accounts while Japan has 17 million web users.

* Current fuel economy ratings show that it takes about one pound of coal to create, package, store, and move 2MB of data. At 100 million Internet nodes, the electrical consumption would add up to 290 billion-kilowatt hours of demand, equal to about eight percent of the total demand of the United States. If one billion PCs were attached to the web, they would account for electrical demand, equal to the total capacity of the United States today. (See Forbes Magazine, May 31, 1999).

The progress of information technology and the storage industry has been phenomenal since its early beginnings in 1952. With storage capacities now exceeding 60 percent growth rates per year and micro-processors density tracking Moore's law of doubling every eighteen months with no clear end in sight, we can expect these observations to become obsolete quickly. Save this article for future reference; one day we will wonder what it was like when the Information Age was in its infancy.