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Unit 5: Business Hardware Software and IT Infrastructure

6. ............................... uses individual atoms and molecules to create computer chips and other Notes
devices that are thousands of times smaller than current technologies permit.

5.4 Law of Mass Digital Storage

A second technology driver of IT infrastructure change is the Law of Mass Digital Storage. The
world produces as much as 5 exabytes of unique information per year (an exabyte is a billion
gigabytes, or 1018 bytes). The amount of digital information is roughly doubling every year
(Lyman and Varian, 2003). Almost all of this information growth involves magnetic storage of
digital data, and printed documents account for only 0.003 percent of the annual growth.
Fortunately, the cost of storing digital information is falling at an exponential rate. Figure 5.6
shows that PC hard drive capacity—beginning with a Seagate 506 in 1980 that had 5 megabytes
of memory—has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent in the early years to
over 60 percent a year since 1990. Today’s PC hard drives have storage densities approaching
1 gigabyte per square inch and total capacities of over 200 gigabytes (IBM, Seagate).
Figure 5.6: The Capacity of Hard Disk Drives
grows Exponentially, 1980–2004

Figure 5.7: The Cost of Storing Data Declines
Exponentially, 1950–2004

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