David has just taken delivery of a 1TB drive at work. We wondered how long it would take to read a TB disk full of (uncompressed ascii) text. Here are our back-of-the-envelope calculations:
1TB =
10^12 bytes =
8 * 10^12 bits =
1.14 * 10 ^12 characters [1] =
1.9 * 10^11 words [2] =
950,000,000 minutes[3] =
1,806.22 years [4]
[1] Assume 7 bits per ascii character (using the basic subset of 128 7 bit characters)
[2] Assume an average of 6 characters per word
[3] Assume a 200 wpm reading speed
[4] That's reading 24*7*364.25 But give yourself an 18 minute break to account for the accumulated leap seconds
As of May '09, the US Library of Congress has accumulated 100 TB of data. I'm assuming that's not all ascii text though
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