Today modern computers have vast amounts of storage in them, especially compared to what we had in the not too distant past! We’re all pretty comfortable walking around with little devices hanging off our keychains with volumes of data that could only be dreamed of when man first landed on the moon in the late 60’s! And yet, most people don’t truly understand how much data they’re really using or working with. Let’s put some of this into some perspective that we can wrap our heads around, shall we?
So, the simple byte. I know most of us have heard that word before, but how many of you really know what that means? Get ready, you’re about to get trivia gold for Computer Storage!
1 and 0. That’s it. Everything you see on your computer, phone, tablet, or any other digital electronic device today is made up of nothing more than ones and zeros! Sounds kind of funny when you put it that way huh? Well, it’s true! And these bits need to be in some sort of standard format and this is where Binary came into play with computers. That’s why you see all those funny numbers, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 and so on… They’re all multiples of ones and zeros. But Gurmpy Sysadmin, what does this have to do with mega, giga or other bytes? Just hand in there, I’m getting to that…
First we has the simple bit, but they decided they needed to call a collection of bits, and it was generally agreed upon that 8 bits would be called a ‘Byte’. Notice how 8 bits matches nicely in that funny list of multiples of 0 and 1? That’s not an accident! 
Well, as computers advanced and storage capacity grew, they found themselves with way more that a few ‘bytes’, 1,024 bytes to be specific, and since this was the closest number to 1,000, they called this a kilobit (kilo being the metric name for 1,000). Now I get it, 1,000 doesn’t exactly equal 1,024 so 1,000 bytes mathematically isn’t TRULY a kilobyte, but it was close enough that it simply became the accepted standard (a fact that hard drive and storage manufacturers continue to leverage to this day! More on that later on).
So, we have:
Bit
Byte
Kilobyte
And time continued to march on. Storage continued to grow… and as it did we came up to a million bytes or 1,000(ish) kilobytes, and along came the name megabyte. I don’t know exactly when all the other names were adapted (gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte and so on), but suffice to say all storage manufacturers continues to use nice easy to remember and calculate round numbers even though they really weren’t mathematically accurate to the true value, but we all accepted this as our reality and it’s stuck.
At last! We’re at 1 Megabyte! Ah, a ‘meg’! A size we so got used to in the late 80’s and early 90’s as floppy disks were the storage media of choice, because they were cheap, abundant and readily available just about anywhere. 
(Workers loading a 5MB hard drive in the 1950’s)
We wrote our documents, saved our work, backed up our information and carried it around on small plastic and metallic disks and were happy. But did we have any concept as to how much storage that really was?
The honest truth is, we didn’t have a clue!
Let’s do the math here. For simplicity sake, we’re going to use round numbers like storage vendors to.
1 megabyte. In storage terms, it’s defined as 1,000,000 bytes. Remember, each byte is made up of 8 bits, so 8,000,000 bits. Sounds like a lot, and it is!
If we represented these bits in something familiar that we all can understand, let’s say that each bit is represented by the width of a standard US Penny or about 0.75 inches. At that scale, 8 million pennies laid end to end would stretch from roughly Philadelphia PA to New York City, or about 84.7 miles… And we were carrying that amount of storage around on little plastic and metal disks in our pockets!
Well, hang on, things are about to get a while lot bigger!
Let’s take this size comparison to the next size up, the Gigabyte. A gigabyte is simple 1,000 megabytes. Represented mathematically, it would be 1,000,000,000 bytes. As bits, it would be 8,000,000,000 bits.
If we did the same comparison, represented each bit as a penny, it would reach for approximately 94,697 miles! At this distance, it would wrap around the surface of the earth 3.8 times! Let’s put this another way, this same distance is roughly 40% of the distance between the Earth and the Moon!
But, we’re just getting started!
Next up? The Terabyte! For most home users, this is generally the largest size unit of storage you’ll deal with currently, but our hunger for storage keeps growing and growing! If we were to perform the same comparisons and calculations for a Terabyte, we would be talking about 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 8 TRILLION bits. Yes, trillion… 
Represented as pennies, it would stretch for roughly 94.7 Million miles! That’s roughly 60% of the average distance from Earth to Mars! And you’re walking around with that on a Thumb drive in your pocket!
Let’s keep the fun going! For those that want to hear about some REALLY big numbers, keep reading!
I created a YouTube short on this and one of the replies I got asked “what about peta and exabytes?”
So I though, let’s find out…. Here’s those numbers!
If we extend these calculations to a petabyte, you would have 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10^15 bytes. This means a petabyte is 8,000,000,000,000,000 bits. Laid end to end, it would reach approximately 94.67 BILLION miles. Using the distance of the Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 93 million miles, also known as 1 AU or “Astronomical Units”, 94.67 billion miles would be roughly the equivalent of 1,018 AU. This distance would reach almost to the far reaches of the solar system or the Oort cloud (where the sun’s gravitational influence ends and “deep space” or where the outside of our solar system begins). To put this in perspective of REALLY big distances, 94.67 billion miles is a mere 0.0161 of a light year in distance.
Because it was also asked, an exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10^18 bytes. That means an exabyte is 8,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits. Laid end to end, it would reach approximately 94.67 TRILLION miles. Using the distance of the Earth to the Sun (from the previous example) of 1 AU or “Astronomical Units”, 94.67 trillion miles would be roughly the equivalent of 1,017,957 AU. This mind boggling distance is the equivalent of approximately 16.1 light years (which to be clear is how far light will travel in a year, it’s a measure of distance, not of time). At this distance, you could travel to Earths nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri at 4.37 light years away and back again almost twice!
And I’m not done yet!
And here I thought an Exabyte was big… Oh boy, here we go… A yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10^24 bytes. That means a yottabyte is 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits. Laid end to end it would reach approximately 94,700,000,000,000,000,000 miles or approximately 16,107,600 light years. This distance, taken on a GALACTIC scale (we’re well beyond interstellar distances here) it would reach far beyond the next closest spiral galaxy, our neighbor Andromeda at a mere 2.537 million light years away. At 16 million light years, you could travel to the Andromeda Galaxy and back again more than three times! And you thought an Exabyte was big!
So, another question I had in response to my video was what about on the small scale? What if we represented each bit as a single electron?
It’s difficult to quantify this if we’re talking about electrons because electrons are particles with no defined size in classical physics, but for argument sake, let’s say each electron adheres to the classical estimation of their radius of 2.82 x10 to the minus 15 meters. At that size, 94.67 trillion electrons laid end to end would measure roughly 26.7 centimeters (or just over 10.5 inches) or less than a foot in length.
It’s amazing the difference in lengths are when comparing the very large (pennies) to the very small (electrons)
Any way you put it, we humans have developed and continue to develop massive, mind boggling amounts of storage and then continue to fill it up! The next time you see your email box is full and you have 100 gigabytes of “stuff” in there (as an example), remember the amount of storage that’s taking up, if you represented all of that email as pennies (for each bit), it would stretch for approximately 94,697,000 miles, or more than halfway to the planet Mars from Earth!
Delete something will ya? 😉