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WAB Faculty & Staff

Factfulness, Inquiry & Global Ignorance: How Much Data?

Resources for inquiries based on a data-informed worldview.

Here is a visualisation for different scales of digital data. Starting at MB, it zooms out all the way to YB. At each stage, it presents the previous unit to scale, and shows some real-world equivalencies below. There is a pretty rough search element as well, that you can try with examples. 

The format is inspired by Information Is Beautiful's Billion-Dollar-Gram, and created through a pretty iterative process with Claude 3.7 Sonnet on Poe.com. 

Data Storage Scale Visualization

Examples: iPhone photos, human genome, Netflix library, Wikipedia, Library of Congress, all music ever recorded...
Search Result
Terabyte (TB)
A terabyte contains 1,024 gigabytes. It's commonly used to measure the storage capacity of servers and enterprise storage systems.
Real-world examples:

Scale: Each unit is 1,024 times larger than the previous unit.

Click on any unit box to focus on it, or use the buttons above to change the view.

Color: Darker shades represent smaller units (MB), lighter shades represent larger units (YB).

Search: Enter an item to see its approximate data storage size on the visualization.