1TB Used to Fill a Building
The physical size of one terabyte, 1956 to 2019, drawn to scale: from ~267,000 IBM RAMAC cabinets (a building) to one 3.5-inch drive in your palm (2007) to a fingernail-sized microSD (2019) — a roughly three-trillion-fold physical collapse, and the wall it's now hitting.
—credits6sourcesAll episodes
Data sources & references
022007 Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 — first consumer 1 TB HDD, $399 (contemporary reviews)
032019 SanDisk 1 TB microSD, $449.99 — Engadget / PetaPixel coverage
04Areal density 2,000 bits/in² (1956) → ~1–1.5 Tbit/in² today; Kryder-rate deceleration (~39%/yr 2000s → ~7.6%/yr 2009–2018)
05~181 zettabytes of data generated in 2025 — IDC