I’m editing a column on personal data management/access, and need a nice factoid–anybody know (or know how to find out) how much data Americans have on their personal computers? Like, “Today, Americans have more than 400 Terabytes of data on their personal computers.” etc.
Factoids do not have to be accurate!
- pull a random number out of your nether regions
- ???
- Profit!
What do you consider “data”?
Songs in iTunes? My bank records? Porn?
Since you can buy a personal computer with 1 terabyte of storage, depending on how you classify data the answer is more than 400TB
There are 300 million Americans and 40% of them have personal computers, so about 12 million personal computers. Average size hard drive is 60 mb so about 7.2 X 10^14 bytes of storage available. Thats about 670 terabytes. But not all of that is personal data and hard drives are rarely full so you could probably take 10% or even 5% of that number.
Your 12 million number above is an error.
If only the edit function persisted longer than 5 minutes …
I’m going to have to ask for a cite on that 60 MB average HD size too! :dubious:
Considering I know more than one person who has personal HD storage measured in TB, my WAG would be that your real answer would be expressed in PB or EB !
You can do this as a “How many piano tuners in New York question?” This type of thing is sometimes used in job interviews and as an intellectual excerice. The idea is that a reasonably informed person can figure out the answer within an order of magnitude or even much better by taking educated guesses that converge on the answer. Reasonable amounts of error in the guesses will tend to cancel each other out.
Here we go:
-
How many people are in the U.S.? 300 million
-
How many people per household? 3
-
How many households? 100 million
-
How many of those housholds have at least one computer? 60 million
-
How many households have more than one computer? 30 million
There is a flaw in the question here because the question stipulates personal computers which would imply non-work computers but most computers are called PC’s regardless of purpose.
-
How many personal computers total? 75 million
-
What is the average size of a hard drive today for all working computers? 100 gb
-
How much space is being used on average by data files as opposed to the OS and applications? 20 Gb
Answer: Personal and household computers in the U.S. hold about:
2145767211914.0625 megabytes (abbreviated as M or MB)
2095475792.88483 gigabytes (abbreviated as G or GB)
2046363.078989 terabytes
1998.4014443 petabytes
1.95156391 exabytes
If I were guessing, I’d peg the average HDD size at 40GB or less, as there are a LOT of machines between 5 and 10 years old with much smaller hard drives, and 40GB or less was pretty typical for 2.5" drives until very recently.
On review, 100GB is WAY too high as an average. Remember we have to count computers in USE, not computer or HDD sales. For every person that buys a new boxed drive or new machine, there’s an Aunt Millie out there running win98SE on a 9GB or smaller drive.
I personally have 500 Gig or space on my main computer, 320 gig on my old computer various 80 gig external drives floating around. My wife has a few computers also with smaller laptop sized drives of 10 to 30 gigs. As for data. Real personal data is less that a gig. Multi media files like our ripped music collection that we play on our stero with a roku device streaming music from my computer are much larger. The music collection is about 40 gig. There are some movies about 50 gigs of those. A few gigs of personal photos. There are about 10 or so gigs of installed programs excluding windows. Most of this is replicated on our various computers.
Basically I am saying that I have between 100 gigs and 4 gigs of data on my computers depending on what you are trying to measure. Not a great help but there it is.
Is there any distinction at all between “data on my computer” and “data on my hard disk”? (I can remember when computers didn’t have hard drives!)