Originally posted by robtcorl 5MB hard drive in 1956.
It's interesting to think how little data 5MB is and how much space that took up at the time.
So a byte is 8 bits, where one bit is either a 0 or 1. With a word document open and writing down some bytes, just "01010101" for simplicity with a space in between to separate them, I can fit 2500 "bytes" on a US standard letter page at a small but readable font size 5 with ¼" page margins. If one were to print that double sided, you get 5KB of data per sheet of paper. That means that 5MB hard drive there only has the data capacity of 1000 sheets of paper. With a ream of standard copy paper being roughly five pounds, that's only 10 lbs.
On the other hand, look at the 64GB SD card in my camera... it's figuratively nothing and "holds" nearly 13 million sheets of this paper... but wait. You get up to 1TB
microSD cards now, which is equivalent here to 200 million sheets of paper... or around 2 million pounds of paper! How can one even visualize how much that is... according to Google, a Boeing 747 is around 400 thousand pounds. So that 1TB microSD card has the equivalent weight of five 747s of paper in data. All in something that weighs one quarter of a gram! Pretty amazing. And there I go mixing imperial and metric units again