Hello, I am familiar with all of the common byte sizes and most of the generally unknown ones, but I have a speculation.

 

The terrabyte is mainly used for extensive personal files and small servers, but petabytes these are used in the larger internet servers. In fact i have actually found an 8 petabyte HDD tower on ebay for an interesting sum, 10 million USD. Actually I set the item to "watch" and incredibly, it sold.

 

With all of this one could infer that in my life span (I am a freshman) that large files such as movies or video games could encompass a whole terrabyte and petabytes could be today's equivalent of a terrabyte.

 

Frankly, I could rant on about exo, zeta and yottabytes but i'd probably be wasting my breath...or finger stamina, oh you know what i mean.

You have to remember that while storage spaces are getting larger, software developers are constantly trying to minimize the space in which their software takes up. It would certainly be cost efficient to keep doing so too, because as you witnessed on ebay, storage space can become quite a feat to purchase (though why anyone would keep that much data on one disk is ridiculous)

 

So while Bungie is developing a better 3D engine for Halo games in the future, they're still trying to find a way to make the new program take the same, or less, space as the original. This means it hopefully won't come out with 2-3 disc games in the future, thus saving an extra $.30 or so per game from the extra disc it would consume (in reality the number is a bit higher)

 

30 cents translated into 500 million copies can get a bit expensive.

 

 

of course storage space will continue to get bigger if companies continue to grow, 1 million employee profiles are hard to store on the same disk space you use for 500,000 employees.

It's possible for video files to take up a terabyte. For example, there's Super Hi-Vision:

 

 

The storage space required by video increases exponentially with the resolution (since there are vertical and horizontal components)

That scaling seems polynomial (more precisely: quadratic), not exponential.

Can the human eye even resolve that much detail?

bascule is right, there can be some ginormous file extensions depending on how your settings are input - sorry, from his examples I went straight to commercial applications. And while feasible to be used in the business world, any R&D person or IT guy would faint at a 500GB single file

wow 2.2GiB/s for Super Hi vision uncompressed. lossy compression can usually knock that down to a tenth so 220MiB/s for the lossy compression. dual layer bluray would hold less than 4 minutes of that.

Can the human eye even resolve that much detail?

 

7680 x 4320 is approximately 33 megapixels. According to some random web site, the human eye's equivalent in megapixels is approximately 576 megapixels. So... yes, and then some.

Interesting, yes the need to reduce file size is becoming very, very important to program distributers, and you all grasped my idea with a sense of delicacy that i am not used to, in fact it's impossible for me to ask ANYONE these type of questions . Nonetheless tell me more about this "Super-high vision" in fact that kind of clarity is amazing in of itself.

 

Secondly, i feel special, all of the big wigs responded to my thread.