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Comment by jdnier | Hacker News Reader

From a recent IEEE Spectrum article: "If you were to make a 2-hour motion picture with an extended color range in 4K and at 48 frames per second, the raw (uncompressed) movie file would occupy more than 15 terabytes. For comparison, the total amount of data in all of the e-mails sent in the United States in one year has been estimated to be 10.6 TB." http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/las...

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The email estimation seems off by several orders of magnitude. If you follow the link in the IEEE article, you get this:

> It's estimated that the average size of an email is 75 kilobytes. Say we decide that 75 kb average is way off the mark and bump it up to 200 kilobytes per email times 144.8 billion emails per day times 365 days per year and were at just under 10.6 terabytes per year (3 of those Seagate drives will do the trick).

But doing that math myself results in:

   200 000  *  144 800 000 000  *  365  =  1.05 * 10^19

In other words, 10 exabytes. 1,000,000 times more than 10 TB. So, 3,000,000 Seagate drives, not 3.

Uhm... so? 15 TB of storage cost way under $1k.

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