I remember when I was in college I was using those 100 MB Iomega zip disks for storing school papers and projects.  I thought I was so far ahead of the curve.  Everyone else had a pile of 3.5 floppies, when I had my entire body of school work on that one zip disk.  They never took because they couldn’t match the popularity of the 3.5 and the storage space of a re-writable CD and DVD, which were both right around the corner.  Then the USB drives hit.  I bought my first 1 GB thumb drive for 40 bucks at the school book store my last year of college. Just two years ago I bought my first 1 TB hard drive.  I’ve got my entire music collection (including all 20 Rush albums #ProgRock) as well as 3000+ pictures.  Throw in some raw video from a VHS conversion project and I’m already running out of space.  I’m guessing we’ll see petabyte drives pretty soon if they’re not already here.

Now I’m reading articles talking about exabytes and zettabytes.  (Don’t lie, you had to go look up zettabyte just like I did).  A zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes.  To try to put it in perspective, in 2009 the entire Internet was estimated to contain 500 exabytes.  According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, 1 exabyte amounts to 36,000 years of HD-TV video, or the equivalent of streaming the entire Netflix catalog 3,177 times.  During the 2011 Fiscal Year, Seagate reported selling a combined total of 330 exabytes of hard drives.

If that didn’t blow your mind this will: Some nerds over at IBM Research in California who have figured out how to store one bit of data with just 12 atoms.  Today’s hard drives are using more than a million atoms to store a single bit and more than half a billion to store a byte, which is 8-bits or the letter “A”. The storage technique is based on an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism.  (Use that one at your next Community Technology Mixer.)  Basically, with conventional ferromagnetism the magnetic fields from one bit interfere with the neighboring bit so you are unable to pack them close together.  Antiferromagnets cancel each other out and can be packed closer together allowing for increased data storage density.  Once they get all the kinks worked out we could be seeing petabyte thumb drives.

We’re dense here at Fogo.  Although we’re not talking in exabytes yet, terabytes are the norm over here.  We’ve got the space your looking for.  Whether it’s cabinet space or hard drive space, there’s plenty of room.  We’re your density….I mean your destiny.