Storage: Digital Obesity?

By Jim on December 13th, 2004

I don’t doubt this at all. The more disk space I have, the more crap builds up on it.

Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in “weight”.

Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), a Toshiba study found.

It found that more than 60% kept 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, making the UK “digitally fat”. “Virtual weight” measurements are based on research by California Institute of Technology professor Roy Williams. He calculated physical comparisons for digital data in the mid-1990s. He worked out that one gigabyte (1,073,741,824 bytes) was the equivalent of a pick-up truck filled with paper.

The amount of data people are squirreling away on their gadgets is clearly a sign that people are finding more things to do with their shiny things.

tinyharddrive

I know that I’ve already squirreled away tons of stuff on my iPAQ’s 1GB SDM card. I used to have a 32MB card and now I can’t imagine getting by with something that small! :shock:

It’s never going to end either. The more storage expands, the more our data will expand to fill it. I can’t wait for the day when my PDA or cell phone will hold a terabyte of data. One terabyte? Hell, why not a hundred terabytes!!!
:mrgreen: