How do we have so much space to store and share internet content? Wouldn’t we run out of space at some point because you can only build so many data or cloud servers?

Question

With literally billions of internet users sharing billions of bytes of data every day there must be an endpoint where the servers can no longer handle the traffic anymore. I see this all the time with websites crashing because too many users try to access the same website at once.

In: 2

Answer 1

There is a limit of the number of servers that can be built on earth because there is a finite amount of material on earth. But that does not mean we are close to maxing out storage any time soon.

A billion byte is not a lot of data at all, a gigabyte is a billion byte. There is 22 terabyte hard drives on the market today. 1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes so they can store 22 000 billion bytes.

The mass of a drive like that is around 2/3 kg and most of that is aluminum. Earth crust has a mass of around 20^19 tonnes, it is around 8% aluminum. We extract around 50 million tonnes of aluminum every year.

A billion byte is not a lot of data at all, a gigabyte is a billion byte. There is 22 terabyte hard drives on the market today. 1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes so they can store 22 000 billion bytes. the surface gets too hot for any life. So if we continue to use aluminum like today we have enough for the rest of the life of the earth.