JLGoolsbee.com

Ok, check this out:

Most computers these days have hard drives measured in gigabytes, the largest of which is currently 750 gigabytes. Common sizes are 60, 80, 120… more than likely your computer has a hard drive somewhere in that ballpark.

ILM (International Light & Magic), the special effects department of LucasArts produces cinematic effects for tons of films. Those source files for those effects generally pretty large, so ILM has a great need for having a large amount of hard drive storage on hand. The chart above (courtesy of CNet.com) shows “Available vs. Used High Performance Production Storage”; the blue shaded area shows the used portion of the available (the red shaded area). I had to resize the picture to fit it here, but you can see just at the right edge of the chart a jump in the available storage, topping out at… just under 135 terabytes. For the uninitiated, 1 terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes, or 1,048,576 megabytes. This means that ILM has 138,240 gigabytes, or 141,557,760 megabytes of storage.

Lets say you have an 80 gigabyte hard drive in your computer… that means ILM has 1,728 times the capacity of your computer.

If you’ve got a 30 gigabyte iPod, ILM has 4,608 times the storage of your iPod.

Based on Apple’s estimate that a 30 gigabyte iPod will hold 7,500 songs, that means that ILM could store 34,560,000 songs. Also based on Apple’s estimate of 4 minutes per song, those 34.5 million songs would total up to (take your pick of the following):
-> 138,240,000 minutes
-> 2,304,000 hours
-> 96,000 days
-> 3,154 months
-> 262.84 years

I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of storage in my book.