News-Letter

Imagine how much music you could store on 2.7 billion iPods. According to a recent study, that's how much information was produced worldwide last year.

Experts at International Data Corporation (IDC), a market research firm specializing in technology, undertook an analysis of all of the digital information produced, transmitted and archived in 2006. They came up with a final figure of 161 exabytes.

An exabyte is a billion gigabytes or a billion billion bytes, the smallest size for a piece of digital information. That's equivalent to the total memory capacity about 2.68 billion 60-gigabyte iPods.

Text, data, video, images and sound are all stored digitally as combinations of ones and zeroes, the basic units of the binary code on which all computers run. A single byte consists of eight of these binary digits, or bits.

The data set included information on Web sites and computer networks, cell phone conversations, digital movies and other media and files stored on individual computers.

The number is somewhat inflated because the researchers counted each time a file was opened. On average, each file was stored three times. If these duplicates are removed, the figure is closer to 40 exabytes.

The primary concern of the study was how to store all of this data. The IDC analysts estimated that there were about 185 exabytes of storage space available worldwide in 2006, just enough for all of the information produced in that year.

Although total memory capacity will continue to steadily increase, it is likely that the amount of information produced will increase at an even greater rate.

An explosion of scientific research, the ease of global communication and widespread access to the Internet all contribute to this staggering growth.

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