I’ve been marveling at the rate at which humankind is generating data and the hardware capacity that will be needed to store it all. Has anyone analyzed the physical limits to electronic data storage?

Core77 (cool design site I follow) is blogging today about the above Neatorama chart visualizing 12 terabytes of information. As a sometimes fan of Edward Tufte — love his books but find his lectures wanting — I found the Neatorama chart pretty neat. Check out the original Neatorama post for more figurative color.

If you’re wondering how large a terabyte is, note:

• 1 Bit = Binary Digit
• 8 Bits = 1 Byte
• 1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
• 1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
• 1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
• 1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
• 1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
• 1000 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
• 1000 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
• 1000 Zettabytes = 1 Yottabyte
• 1000 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte
• 1000 Brontobytes = 1 Geopbyte

By the way, I’ve long assumed that human brain capacity far exceeds electronic data storage capacity. Neatorma is estimating human brain capacity at 1.25 terabytes by relying on the opinion or work of futurist Raymond Kurzweil.

Enjoy.