DAC TRADERS
| Business category 1 | Laptops |
| City ( of main office ) | Kingston, JM, Jamaica |
| Address | Lot 119 Reid's Pen, Braeton |
| Phones | 1-876-301-6033 |
| Fax | 1-876-746-8230 |
| About | Introduction The cost of magnetic storage is dropping rapidly; as of Fall 2000 a gigabyte of storage costs less than $10 and it is predicted that this cost will drop to $1 by 2005. Soon it will be technologically possible for an average person to access virtually all recorded information. The natural question then becomes: how much information is there to store? If we wanted to store "everything, " how much storage would it take? We have conducted a study to answer this question. In particular, we have estimated yearly US and world production of originals and copies for the most common forms of information media. We have also attempted to estimate the cumulated stock of information in various formats. Finally, we have described the magnitudes of some communication flows that are currently not stored but may well be in the future. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Information produced by medium Most information is stored in four physical media: paper, film, optical (CDs and DVDs) , and magnetic. There are very good data for the worldwide production of each storage medium, and there are reasonably good estimates of how much original content is produced in each of these different formats. We have identified production of content by media type, translated the volume of original content into a common standard (terabytes) , determined how much storage each type takes under certain assumptions about compression, attempted to adjust for duplication of content, and added up to get total estimates. Table 1 depicts yearly worldwide production of original stored content as of 1999. In general, the upper estimate is based on the raw data, while the lower estimate reflects an attempt to adjust for duplication and compression. We discuss these adjustments below and in the medium-specific documents. Note that the growth rate estimates are very rough. See the "Qualifications" section and Appendix A for further discussion; the details of the calculations are presented in the accompanying documents |
| Date | 2011 Oct 29, 09:10 |