How much is 640 terabytes?
It's about 900,000 times as much as a Compact Disc
The amount of a Compact Disc is about 0.0007031 terabytes.
(80-minute, 360,000 sector disc; "Red Book" specifications)
A typical, 80-minute capacity compact disc, commonly known as a 0.0006676 terabytes disc will actually hold 0.0007031 terabytes of data. Such disks are 1.2 mm (0.047 in) thick.
It's about 0.00000002 times as much as All Spoken Words in Human History (recorded)
The amount of All Spoken Words in Human History (recorded) is about 45,000,000,000 terabytes.
(2003 figures) (assumes 16 Khz, 16-bit mono recording)
Criticizing a 2002 estimate of 5,200,000 terabytes, linguist and University of Pennsylvania professor Mark Liberman asserted that it would actually require 45,000,000,000 terabytes to house a recording of all speech in human history, even at a relatively low level of quality. For the purposes of his calculations, Liberman estimated the total duration of such a project to include 416,390,367 years of continuous audio.
It's about 150,000,000 times as much as The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The amount of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is about 0.00000510 terabytes.
(ASCII, plain text)
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare would occupy about 0.00000510 terabytes when written in plain text without formatting. These works include 38 definitively-attributed plays — 11 tragedies, 17 comedies, and 10 tragedies — as well as 154 sonnets and numerous other poems.
It's about 200,000,000 times as much as a MP3 Song
The amount of a MP3 Song is about 0.00000300 terabytes.
(a.k.a. MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, a.k.a. MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3) (128 Kbps, "near-CD-quality"; 3 minutes duration; average)
A three-minute song of typical quality will be about 0.00000300 terabytes when encoded into MP3 format. The song Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega was used by AT&T-Bell Labs engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg to test the compression process and is considered the first MP3 song.
It's about 450,000,000 times as much as a Digital Photo
The amount of a Digital Photo is about 0.00000140 terabytes.
(5.3 megapixels, JPEG compression, 100% quality, 24 bits/pixel)
A 5.3-megapixel digital camera photo requires about 0.00000140 terabytes of storage space. In 2010, it was expected that 90% of all professionally-taken photographs would be digital instead of film.
It's about 500,000,000 times as much as a Floppy Disk (3½-in)
The amount of a Floppy Disk (3½-in) is about 0.00000134110 terabytes.
(high density, IBM PC format)
Despite common reference to them as "1.44" megabyte (mB) disks, the actual capacity of the most common model of a 3&-in (8.9 cm) floppy disk is 0.00000134110 terabytes. At the height of their use 1996, there were an estimated five billion disks in use — nearly one for each person on Earth at the time.
It's about 300,000,000,000 times as much as a Page of Text
The amount of a Page of Text is about 0.00000000220 terabytes.
(50 lines, 50 characters per line, ASCII encoding)
A 50-character-per-line, 50-line page of Latin alphabet text requires 0.00000000230 terabytes when digitally represented. The Google Books project, which has produced hundreds of millions of pages of digital text, used a robotic device to digitize over eight million titles at a rate of about 1,000 pages per second.
It's about 7,000,000,000,000 times as much as a Magnetic Stripe Card
The amount of a Magnetic Stripe Card is about 0.0000000001000 terabytes.
(maximum capacity; per ISO 7811 specification)
The storage capacity of a magnetic stripe on a credit or identification card is about 0.0000000001000 terabytes. According to legend, Forrest Parry, the IBM engineer who developed the first magnetic stripe card in 1960, was able to solve the problem of adhering the strip to the card after his wife suggested using an iron.