New research (1) from Fujitsu Siemens Computers reveals that over one million UK homes now have at least a terabyte (or over 1,000 gigabytes) of digital media. This equates to shelved books stretching for more than 6.5 miles or just over two laps of Silverstone Grand Prix circuit.
The findings reveals that the UK household is becoming increasingly digitally advanced, and for many the “terabyte home” is already a reality with many families having multiple digital devices.
Over 2.3m households have three or more PCs in their home and 5.25m homes have two or more laptops; 1.5m admit to having four or more iPods or MP3 players and 3m households boast three or more digital cameras.
Sean Haffey, head of storage at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, commented: “Imagine a bookshelf running twice around the circuit at Silverstone, stacked with books. That is a lot of information to have in one home, but it is clear that this is rapidly becoming the norm as these digital devices proliferate.”
In terms of the total amount of digital media within the UK home, Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ research highlights the advance of the “terabyte home”, which has the capacity to store in excess of 1,000 gigabytes (GB) of digital media. There are now over one million such “terabyte homes” in the UK.
Typical storage make-up of a “terabyte home”:
Item Capacity in GB per device Storage
PC 80GB 80GB
Laptop 60GB 60GB
iPods / MP3 players (x2) 10GB 20GB
PDAs, mobile phones 1GB 1GB
Hard disk recorders 160GB 160GB
Digital cameras 1GB 1GB
DVDs (average 150 DVDs) 4.2GB 630GB
CDs (average 150 CDs) 0.7GB 72GB
Total amount of storage 1024GB*
*This is the minimum amount of total storage that these “terabyte homes” will have; many of the higher-end digital homes surveyed had multiple numbers of the same device so the total amount of storage would exceed 1024GB
Sean Haffey, said: “Many people really have no idea just how much data they have stored in their home. The growing number of digital devices, PCs and laptops as well as the ubiquitous mobile phones and MP3 players, has meant that the amount of digitally stored media in the home has really exploded over the past decade and it’s set to continue as more and more people turn to digital media as a means of storing photographs, music and films.
“Indeed we’ve identified a growing number of so-called ‘terabyte homes’ that accommodate a terabyte or more of data. This figure is staggering when you consider a typical UK retail bank had just 1 terabyte of storage in the mid 1990s for its credit card operations. It also highlights the need for households to ensure that they are backing up this data adequately either remotely or on home servers.”
What’s in a byte?
Quantity of data Equivalent
1 byte A single character
1 kilobyte (1,024 bytes) A page of text
1 megabyte (1,024 kilobytes) A small novel
1 gigabyte (1,024 megabytes) A movie at TV quality
1 terabyte (1,024 gigabytes) 50,000 trees made into paper and printed
1 petabyte (1,024 terabytes) Three years of NASA’s Earth Observing System data
1 exabyte (1024 petabytes) All words ever spoken by human beings
(1) Research conducted by phone by GfK NOP amongst 1,000 adults aged 16+ between 18th and 20th January 2008. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 16+). The omnibus research conducted by GfK NOP uses a large sample size that reflects the demographic profile of Great Britain. Given this it is possible to extrapolate figures for Great Britain from the research results within appropriate confidence intervals.
