It’s not terribly revelatory to say that there has been an explosion in the amount of digital data recently. After all, in the decades since the term “Information Age” was first coined back in 1971, uninterrupted, unrelenting data growth has been perennial.

In the 1980s, the new Mac OS and Windows layout-rich documents and spreadsheets replaced simple ASCII-based files, invoking the transition from the temporary storage of the day, the 360 kilobyte (KB) 5¼-inch floppy, to much higher capacity 1.44 megabyte (MB) 3½-inch floppies. In that same decade, IBM introduced the 3380, the world’s first gigabyte (GB) capacity hard drive, and it was time for our language to march forward as well. Soon, gigabyte supplanted megabyte as the common term for storage capacity.

And the march continues. New visual and audio file types and increased computing power continue to drive storage capacities upward. But today’s digital data explosion is, indeed, very different.

This is a new era of increasing storage capacity. The Information Age has given way to the Internet Age. Digital data now permeates much more of our lives and lifestyles. It spans our laptops and desktops, of course, but also a new host of broadly used consumer devices like digital cameras, mobile phones, digital video camcorders, car navigation systems, gaming devices, digital video record­ers (DVRs) and handheld audio players, each wholesaling in comparatively huge file types. And while some of these devices have internal solid state storage, many more also have hard drives. Moreover, virtually all of these devices ultimately interact with a larger hard drive storage system for the ability to access, network and share files, songs and games, video footage, digital movies or photos.

More eye-opening still, the large files we have now are clearly just the beginning. A peek into the near-term future reveals even larger file types from uncompressed digital audio, digital television (DTV), downloadable high definition movies and even interactive 3D video, are all on the way.

So while unrelenting data growth may not be a revelation, something bigger is happening. At the center of this powerful story is an inter­section of three points. It’s a crossroad where Culture, Capacity and Content are colliding to create a whole new world view of data. And, once again, it has become time for our language to change.

It’s now time to say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the terabyte.

The Content of the Tera Era

In terms of raw numbers, IDC, a leading market intel­ligence and research firm, estimates the volume of digital data in the world at 2.81 exabytes (EB), or 2.81 million terabytes (TB) as of 2007*. It’s a volume, IDC notes, that is larger than the number of stars in the universe. More astoundingly, IDC also estimates that the amount of digital data will grow by a factor of 10 every five years, thereby surpassing the number of atoms in the universe in about 15 years.

Take a look at something as straightforward as digital communication in the Tera Era. Email has been widely used for a couple of decades and we rarely think of it in terms of terabytes. After all, a typical piece of attach­ment-free email is pretty small, perhaps just a few kilobytes depending on the length of text and any graphics or other added data types. However, sign up for a Gmail account and Google will reserve roughly 6.7GB worth of storage for you at no charge (premium service with more storage is available for a fee). That’s more than 600,000TB worth of tiny emails, based on Google’s estimated 90 million users.

Admittedly, few of Gmail users actually fill that space. But that’s Google’s goal and enough Gmail users retain email correspondence records so that Google has seen fit to increase that capacity more than six fold since February 2007. Amazingly, given that volume of email data, Gmail currently ranks only a distant third in registered webmail users behind Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, both with roughly 250 million users. And, of course, it’s all backed up for security and redundancy, generating 600,000TB worth of tiny emails.

Naturally, a single digital photograph is much larger than a typical email, but is still generally less than a megabyte or two from a consumer-oriented camera. But, just one picture a year from each of the one billion digital cameras currently in the hands of end-users adds up to some 1,000TB, averaging 1MB per photo. Indeed, just one image each week from each of the 146 million newly purchased cameras generates a weekly need for new stor­age of roughly 146TB, or more than 7,500TB in a year.

If we look into the future of digital audio, the demand for storage gets even larger. MP3 files are, by definition, com­pressed digital audio files that save hard drive space, but also diminish the audio quality, most overtly in the highs and lows. That’s been an acceptable trade-off over the last few years in exchange for portability, online availability and convenience. However, the audio quality does not compare with that of stereo audio CDs, and particularly not with the uncompressed surround sound audio on Blu-ray Discs. As the temporary storage in digital audio players and the hard drive capacity both grow, consumer expectations are likely to grow with it, yielding enhanced compression technologies, more audio data and, again, a need for more storage.

There is no greater bandwidth and storage hog than digital video: even individual video clip files can generate gigabytes. With its report of the 50 percent growth rate of the Internet, The New York Times also reports that YouTube alone now uses more bandwidth than the entire Internet did in 2000. It’s a statistic that illustrates how digital video streams can be larger than just about any other type of data.

Consumers with standard “DV” format or high-definition “HDV” format camcorders record video together with audio and metadata at roughly 36Mbits or 4.5MBytes per second. That’s about 270MB per minute or 16.2GB per hour, sixteen times that of a TiVo device.

Data Storage Capacity in the Tera Era

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) estimates that the hard drive industry will ship more than 550 million units this year alone. Given IDC’s forecast for the rapid growth of digital data, unit shipments will continue to grow and so will the capacity of individual hard drives. Fortunately, storage industry history has shown consistent, if not remarkable growth in areal density; that is, the number of data bits per square inch of storage surface. Over the last 50 years, areal density has increased from 2,000 bits per sq. in. when IBM introduced the first hard drive (RAMAC) in 1956 to nearly 100,000,000 times that density today. Remarkably, the growth rate for areal density is growing steadily at 40 percent per year.

In early 2007, Hitachi released the first 1TB hard drive; the 3.5-inch Deskstar 7K1000, with an areal density of more than 178 gigabits per square inch. Later in 2007, Hitachi’s Tokyo R&D labs demonstrated a new type of nanotechnology that shows the promise of enabling 500 gigabits per square inch areal density, which is expected to quadruple current storage capacity limits resulting in a 4TB desktop (3.5 inch) hard drive and a 1TB notebook (2.5 inch) hard drive.

Looking out at the future roadmap, technologies such as Discrete Track Media (DTM), Bit Patterned Media (BPM) and Thermally Assisted Recording (TAR) all show impres­sive potential to allow these already tiny grains to become even tinier—which, again, will mean hard drive capacities can become even bigger. Initial forecasts show that DTM could produce a two times areal density increase, while BPM shows the potential to deliver a tenfold increase in areal densities.

The Tera Era Culture

At its heart, the Tera Era is a technology phenomenon. But it is a cultural event as well. The storage capacities of hard drives continue to set new records due to major advancements and innovations like Perpendicular Magnetic Recording, a daunting techno­logical process the storage industry pursued steadily for decades and ultimately achieved.

But it’s not just capacity for capacity’s sake. The amazing array of content we now expect to have at our fingertips at a moment’s notice is staggering. And the speed with which we demand that content is also amazing. Still images, moving images, digital video and voice, as well as our favorite websites, TV shows and films--all in high defini­tion--have become part of our collective lives. We expect them all and we want them now. And whether these items reside on a handheld, on a laptop or in the “cloud” of digital data stored somewhere else, at some point along the journey they are being created, accessed, archived, backed up and possibly even “mirrored” on a hard drive.

The other cultural element in the Tera Era, of course, is language. Just as in the past when it was time for kilobyte to be replaced by megabyte and then for gigabyte to replace megabyte, the time for change has come again.

It’s now time to say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the terabyte.

It’s happening now. This is the Tera Era.

*John F. Gantz, et. al., “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe,” IDC White Paper, March 2008, 2.

Larry Swezey is director of HDD Marketing & Strategy for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.