What a useless headline. God forbid they just give the actual capacity rather than some abstract, bullshit, flexible measure that means nothing to anyone.
I especially like it when they use airplanes to illustrate weight. “… the same as 15 Boeing 747 jumbo jets”. Airplanes are made to be as light as possible, they go to extreme lengths to save as much weight as they can. As such, a 747 is much lighter than most objects of similar size. People have no intuition of the weight of such large objects to begin with, but then they add to it by using something that is much lighter than you’d expect.
200TB
Woah, I can’t wait to never afford that!
So like, 5-6 uncompressed 4k movies
Asteroid the size of 64 Canada geese to pass Earth Tuesday - NASA
I’m not even making this up …
The US really will do anything to avoid using metric lol
It’s larger than 6 olympic swimming pools and fits in my pants.
They have to make it as accessible a headline as possible, especially when most don’t read past the headline anyway these days. The average person probably doesn’t have much of an idea as to what 125TB looks like in real world use.
I’d argue that most people would have a better idea of what 125TB looks like than knowing the size of a 4k movie file, let alone 14,000 of them. They can at least compare 125TB to their 500GB/1TB phone/computer storage.
Not to mention there’s nearly 10x difference in bitrate between 4K streaming video and actual 4K HDR off a bluray. The only people who know how big a 4K video is these days are nerds and pirates, because it’s not like Netflix tells you.
Most people aren’t tech savvy, and industry acronyms chase them away.
On the other hand, a movie is something everyone can understand.
Not really. A 4K movie means nothing to 99% of people. Is it 4GB? 40? 400? How many can my phone hold? Or my computer?
This only makes things more understandable if you use a point of reference that everyone you’re talking to is familiar with. The fact that they had to then explain how big a 4K movie is in the article clearly shows that even they know that this doesn’t help people. It’s just a big flashy number.
Just for context, I’m a writer, I understand the point of using these abstract measures to give a frame of reference. But in this case, just giving the capacity in GB/TB would have been easier to understand. It just wouldn’t have been as sensational of a headline.
You can understand it but you can’t interpret the value. How many movies is a CD? Or a DVD? Or a 1TB SSD? Or even Avatar in 3D (presumably not 1)? How many movies have even been released in total/last year?
The number awes non-tech savvy folk but it doesn’t really inform them of anything. You could just as well write “more movies than you will ever need”.
And besides that, I personally think that news should try to educate folk. I’m completely fine with a comparison in the article. But why in the headline?
That’s nearly 4 Call of Duty games
1.4Pb (~175TB), the quoted number of movies is based on a 14GB movie which is very small (most BluRay disks hold somewhere between 25 and 50GB) and no discussion about write speed, so basically this is cool research that someone has done and is no closer to a commercial product that any of the dozens of other articles that have come out on this topic in the last 15 years
And I believe 4k blurays are on average around 100 gb? So that will be about 1800-2000 movies. Still a lot, but not the 14.000 they say.
The rips I pirate aren’t re-encoded and are usually in the range of 50-75GB, depending on the length of the film.
Hmm, interesting. I guess on actual Blurays they would have space for extras, menus, sometimes different dubs etc, so that makes sense!
I rip enough physical media to tell you that post-compression 14GB is not far from average for a 4K movie. I guarantee that Netflix isn’t storing those any bigger than that. Hard drives don’t grow on trees, you know?
It’s still good to know where the top end of optical storage is, even at an academic level, even if these end up not being widely used or being used for specific applications at smaller capacities. We’ll see where or if they resurface next, but I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna get femtosecond lasers built into our laptops anytime soon.
Streaming services definitely don’t give you full quality files. They’re compressed to save bandwidth. Netflix only uses about 7GB per hour in 4k. That’s about the exact size of the higher quality 1080p movies I download.
It’s usually less than 7gb per hour, it ranges from 2 to 7GB, it adjusts butrate on the fly. Netflix quality sucks.
Edit: realized I typed butrate instead of bitrate, it fits, so I’m leaving it.
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I wonder what the longevity of one of these discs is? The article says they can be manufactured in regular DVD production facilities, so it probably depends on the material used (which I think can range).
If they could combine something close to this data capacity level with the M-DISC standard (which supposedly last for about 1,000 years once you take into account the organic ingredients) that would be fantastic.
New optical-disks able to hold a shit ton more storage sounds cool, until you realize you probably ain’t gonna be seeing widespread adoption of it among the general public due to cloud storage and things like that, so if it ever does become publicly available it’ll cost way too much.
Cloud storage is just someone else’s computer. That someone else is who the target market for something like this is. Server farms need a lot of storage, and that takes up space. Optical storage of that capacity is great for data you need to read often, which is the vast majority of data on servers.
