Wednesday 29 May 2013

A Mole

So. I was at an IT- and Big Data-related Symposium the other day and the speaker mentioned the need to eventually manage around 5 or 6 zettabytes of data for a particular purpose.  A couple of us in the audience realised we'd suddenly reached an interesting point.  "That's nearly a hundredth of a mole!"

A zettabyte is 10^21 bytes,  or 1,000 exabytes, or 1,000,000 petabytes, or 1,000,000,000 terabytes.

A mole of anything is an Avogadro's number of that thing.  Avogadro's number is 6.022 x10^23.  So 602 and a bit zettabytes of data is one mole of bytes.

To put this in context, a mole of atoms of Carbon 12 weighs 12 grammes (that is how a mole is defined).

So is this an anecdote about how huge our notions of digital data storage have become, or how small they are?   Or is it rather about just how small those tiny atomic scales are?

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