Re: Total Disk space on the internet?

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Jul 02 2003 - 14:56:41 MDT

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    On Wed, Jun 25, 2003 at 10:37:06AM +0930, Emlyn O'regan wrote:
    > On another list, a guy asked this question:
    >
    > ---------
    > I vaguely recall reading an estimate
    > about 8 years ago of the disk space capacity of the Internet at the
    > time. I'm wondering whether anyone can point me to a current estimate ?
    > ---------
    >
    > It struck me as the kind of question this list is good at answering, and is
    > kind of fun. So, any estimates?

    Quick estimate. http://www.ripe.net/hostcount/2003/05/index.html gives
    us 20,209,347 internet hosts. Most likely many of these have plenty of
    other computers linked to them (like ISPs).

    If each computer has a few gigabytes of hard disk space, lets assume 10
    gigs (this is likely high, since there are plenty of older hosts, but we
    are also underestimating the number of computers). So the total amount
    would be 2e6*1e10 = 2e16, or 20 petabytes.

    Assuming a human mind to contain 1e15 bytes, we could upload 20 people
    into the net. 

    -- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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