Drones IoT and how big is a petabyte of data

I posted an article earlier on how drones can collect petabytes of information. That's not drones in total: that's what your company's drones, or your self driving trucks and cars could collect.

All of this is part of the overall story of the explosive growth of non-traditional business data in the digital and IoT age. IDC estimated in Feb 2017 that human and machine generated data is experiencing an overall 10x faster growth rate than traditional business data and that machine data is increasing even more rapidly at 50x the growth rate.

The drone thing is a good example of machine generated data that never existed before. But most people have a hard time thinking about what a petabyte really is.

So here are some good examples:

• If the average MP3 encoding for mobile is around 1MB per minute, and the average song lasts about four minutes, then a petabyte of songs would last over 2,000 years playing continuously.
• If the average smartphone camera photo is 3MB in size and the average printed photo is 8.5 inches wide, then the assembled petabyte of photos placed side by side would be over 48,000 miles long - almost long enough to wrap around the equator twice.
• One petabyte is enough to store the DNA of the entire population of the US – and then clone them, twice.

And there are going to be a lot of drones.