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I guess 8 exabytes doesn't get the same number of clicks Edit: Not really trying to be facetious, but come on. Apple using a lot of storage at a lot of places
by bravetraveler 5y ago
I guess 8 exabytes doesn't get the same number of clicks
Edit: Not really trying to be facetious, but come on. Apple using a lot of storage at a lot of places isn't too surprising
- daxfohl 5y agoIronically, yes: I missed the M in the title, first thought was "isn't that a single hard drive?" and read the article to see why anyone cared. If it was exabytes I doubt I would have looked.
- purplecats 5y agosame here. seems misleading to use a not-as-appropriate unit. I navigated away and I was like.. wait 8TB.. I have more in my closet.
- SilverRed 5y agoAre petabytes a unit people are familiar yet? 8000 petabytes might be more readable.
- hinkley 5y agoI’m only here because I don’t understand why you would say 8 million terabytes instead of 8 exabytes.
- SilasX 5y agoPeople use "terabytes" a lot (on the order of the size of a desktop hard drive), they don't use petabytes or exabytes.
- SilverRed 5y agoPetabytes is a common unit for company scale data but I guess people reading random tech news aren't familiar with it yet. It's also way beyond what we use in other units. Gigalitre is the biggest SI prefix I have seen outside of bytes.
- Robotbeat 5y agoI’ve seen Terawatt and Petawatt.
- hanche 5y agoPetagrams (Pg) is commonly used in climate science. I always wondered why they don’t write it as Gt instead. But gigalitre? Surely, calling them cubic kilometres (edit: should be hm³, see followup comments) would be preferable?
- nlclimber 5y agoNo, a gigalitre equals a cubic hectometer.
- hanche 5y agoOops, you’re right. I think I accidentally squared 1000 instead of cubing it when converting between km³ and m³. Which only goes to show why units can be hard. In the interest of using coherent units, I wish there were a named unit equalling one cubic metre, all the better for attaching prefixes to.
- azalemeth 5y agoOne of my favourite SI units that is used in climate science is the Sverdrup, often used to describe oceanic or river flows, which is a million cubic metres per second, or one cubic hectometer per second. (1) (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup
- mdoms 5y agoBecause an average reader knows what a terabyte because it's a common hard drive size. The typical reader doesn't know how to think about exabytes.
- serf 5y agopeople deal with social media images and text more often than buying hard drives -- and that's (generally) handled in kilobytes. my take : it's because numbers with lots of digits sell clicks easier -- up until scientific notation is needed, and then at that point the general readership can't fathom the number and generally doesn't care. in other words, I bet 8,000,000 terabytes produces more clicks than '8 exabytes' and '6.4 x 10^19 bits' would have. If I had been born a new-age journalist i'd have gone with 8,000,000,000,000 megabytes -- but only if that fit in the link/URL slug and headline for maximum click-bait exposure.
- cratermoon 5y agoHow about "8 station wagons full of tapes"?
- nlclimber 5y agoIreland covered in 3.5’’ HD floppy disks.
- pmontra 5y agoSame reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm, or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm. Some units are usual in some contexts, some are not. In one word, habits.
- sellyme 5y ago> Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm Speak for yourself, I've been trying to popularise "1Mm" for years. Admittedly not with a huge amount of success. > or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm Surely "1 AU" is the preferred form for this one.
- snypher 5y agoIf someone was to ask me how far is was from sun to earth, and I answered 1AU, and they asked what an AU was? The point would be to put it in a familiar unit, even though '150 million' isn't easy to visualize.
- purplecats 5y agopretty sure it was a joke
- sellyme 5y agoNot a joke, the AU is a pretty common unit of measurement when talking about distances too large for metres and too small for light-years, especially since it's based on one of the most widely understood astronomical distances. Of course using it to describe the distance it's derived from is more than a little tautological, but that wasn't too important in the context of discussing magnitude prefixes. It's roughly the same thing as describing a distant potentially-habitable planet as being "1.5 times the size of Earth" instead of giving its radius in metres. It's just that AUs wrap that "n times the distance between the sun and the earth" into a nice standardised unit.
- purplecats 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whoknew1122 5y agoBecause terabytes is a good frame of reference for most computer users. I get paid well to work in the computer space and if I saw 8 exabytes, I'd have to consult a chart/list to just determine how much that is. Most people don't know what an exabyte is. That's why you frame the amount of data in an amount of data (terabyte) that people know.
- omegalulw 5y ago8M terabytes isn't a big number tho. 1TB/person is fairly common these days and Apple has like 900M+ users.
- deeter72 5y agoI would say the family 200GB plan is the most common and also I have to say still its way less paying people than I thought it would be.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 988747 5y agoIs 1TB/person really that common? I mean, my iPhone has 64GB of storage, mostly used for storing photos, which I might want to backup. Other than that, what else do I put on iCloud?
- jobigoud 5y agoTerabyte might be the largest unit people can relate to at a personal level.
- slumdev 5y agoIt's over Eight QUADRILLION kilobytes!