Lesson 5 of 6
From USB Sticks to Data Centres
Scale all the way up: how much the world stores, what a data centre holds, and what an exabyte actually means.
🟡 Intermediate 60 XP
Learn it
Personal scale: a USB stick holds 32–256 GB; a laptop SSD 256 GB–2 TB; an external drive up to 20 TB.
One data centre holds hundreds of thousands of hard drives — hundreds of petabytes. 1 petabyte = 1,000 TB.
Humanity creates hundreds of exabytes of data per year. 1 exabyte = 1 billion GB — about 250 million HD movies.
The biggest data hogs globally: video (YouTube alone gets ~500 hours uploaded every minute), scientific instruments, and AI training.
Try it
Order these storage systems from smallest to largest capacity:
- 1A USB stick (128 GB)
- 2A whole data centre (500 PB)
- 3A single datacentre rack (2 PB)
- 4A laptop SSD (1 TB)
- 5A home backup server (20 TB)
- 6A global cloud provider (exabytes)
Quiz time
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