The Scale of Data
Scroll to get bigger — climb from a single bit to all the world's data and feel how enormous a terabyte really is.
One bit
A bit is the smallest unit of information: a single yes/no, 0 or 1. Eight bits make one byte — everything digital is built from these.
The very start of the scale
One byte
One byte (8 bits) is just enough to store a single character like "A". Every step up this scale multiplies that by 1,000.
The very start of the scale
A short post
A 280-character post is about 280 bytes — roughly 280 of those single letters strung together.
≈ 280× a One byte
A page of text
One page of plain text is around 2 KB (2,000 bytes). A whole book of pure text is only a megabyte or two.
≈ 7.1× a A short post
An ebook
A text-based ebook is about 1 MB — that is a million bytes, or roughly 500 pages of plain text.
≈ 3,571× a A short post
A phone photo
A typical phone JPEG is about 3 MB. One photo already holds as much data as a thousand ebooks’ worth of plain text.
≈ 3× a An ebook
A song
A 4-minute MP3 is around 5 MB. The leap from a photo to a song is small — but the next steps explode.
≈ 5× a An ebook
A minute of HD video
One minute of 1080p video is about 100 MB — roughly 20 songs, just for sixty seconds of moving pictures.
≈ 20× a A song
The human genome
A human genome’s ~3 billion base pairs come to about 750 MB stored simply. The blueprint for a person fits on a single CD.
≈ 7.5× a A minute of HD video
An HD movie
A 2-hour HD movie is around 4 GB — about 1,300 phone photos, or 800 songs, in one film.
≈ 40× a A minute of HD video
All of Wikipedia’s text
The full English Wikipedia text is about 25 GB — smaller than one video game. With images and media it grows past 100 GB.
≈ 6.3× a An HD movie
A video game
A modern AAA game is roughly 70 GB (often 50–100 GB). One game holds more data than all of English Wikipedia’s text.
≈ 18× a An HD movie
A 2 TB SSD
A typical 2 TB consumer drive holds 2 trillion bytes — about 500 HD movies, or the text of Wikipedia 80 times over.
≈ 29× a A video game
The Library of Congress
Estimates for the Library of Congress’s text collections run around 20 TB — though with every scan and recording, the full archive reaches petabytes.
≈ 10× a A 2 TB SSD
A streaming catalog
A large streaming catalog runs on the order of 100 TB — around 25,000 HD movies of data, served to the whole world.
≈ 50× a A 2 TB SSD
All the world’s data
Humanity now generates, copies and consumes about 120 zettabytes a year — 120 followed by 21 zeros of bytes. That is roughly a trillion times one of your phone photos.
≈ 6×10¹⁰× a A 2 TB SSD
You reached all the data in the world.
Data sizes are deceptive. KB, MB, GB, TB — they look like an ordinary list, but each step is a thousand times bigger than the last. A single byte holds one character; a terabyte holds a trillion of them. Scroll down the scale, watch the bytes pile up, and feel the leap from a tweet to a movie to a video game to all the data humanity has ever created — roughly 120 zettabytes.
Sources: this experience uses decimal (SI) units for the ladder — 1 KB = 1,000 bytes, 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes, and so on (binary KiB = 1,024 bytes also exists and is used by some operating systems). File-size figures are typical real-world approximations; the ~120 zettabyte global total is the IDC Global DataSphere estimate for around 2023.
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