Music for Eons

For the first of April, and to break with the tradition of prima diem hoaxes, I wanted to take a casual moment and ask the question: “How can I get my mind around the Zettabyte?”

Identified as 10E21 (10 to the 21st power), it is a lot of data. And to describe ZB as stacks of books piled to Alpha Centuri makes no sense to me, I’ll try another approach.

A 160GB iPod is rated to hold 40,000 songs [link], or 250 songs per GB. At a guesstimated 3 minutes per song, 250 songs equates to 750 minutes, or 12.5 hours of continuous music – per gigabyte. By extension, my 160GB iPod can play 2,000 hours, or over 83 days, of songs (or worse, the same song 40,000 times).

Now, a ZB is 1 trillion GB. Therefore, a 1ZB device should be able to hold 25 billion songs, which could play continuous for 75 billion minutes or 142,694 years.

I wonder how that translates into triple-A batteries?

One	Songs	Minutes	Hours	Days	Years
Giga	250	750	12.50	0.521	0.001
Tera	25,000	75,000	1,250.00	52.083	0.143
Peta	2,500,000	7,500,000	125,000.00	5,208.333	14.269
Exa	250million	750million	12.5million	520,833.333	1,426.941
Zetta	25billion	75billion	1,250 million	52,083,333.333	142,694.064