Help me compare apples to oranges
December 4, 2015 7:47 AM   Subscribe

What is 150GB equivalent to, in terms of "things in the world"? I need a simple comparison that will help people visualize what that amount of data amounts to.

I know 150GB isn't particularly hard for most people to comprehend, in comparison to, say, an exabyte. But I've been asked to put this quantity of data into the context of "numbers of things," like, "number of movies" or "number of e-books." (Obviously, we're talking rough averages here--I know the length/content varies widely, but we're not going for precision here).

However, I don't want it to sound like an ad for your mobile carrier's data plan, and I think I can do better than just "types of digital media." I just want something kind of interesting and unusual, but still very relatable to a group of adults who are neither particularly tech savvy nor tech unsavvy.

I have a burning hope that mefi will have more creative ideas than I will ever be able to come up with!

Though I am acutely aware that this request seems rather insanely specific.
posted by Mrs. Rattery to Technology (14 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Well, books are pretty easy to visualize. If you assume an average of two ebooks per MB, you would have 300,000 ebooks if you had 150 GB of them. You can easily just talk about 300,000 physical books. Or you can go a step further to talk about how many 300,000 is, by say comparing it to a local stadium capacity or the population of a local small city.
posted by OmieWise at 7:58 AM on December 4, 2015 [3 favorites]




Best answer: Wolfram alpha isn't particularly helpful with the term 150GB, but when searching for 1000GB, it gives this comparisons:
~~ ( 0.05 ~~ 1/20 ) × text content of the Library of Congress (~~ 20 TB )

More cool is this BBC Infographic: http://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/bytesized/assets/images/bytesized.png

Sorry neither of those is specifically for 150GB.
posted by czytm at 8:02 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Data as an amount of rice.
posted by Shanda at 8:03 AM on December 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


A high-definition movie on a Blu-ray disc is around 20GB, so 150GB is about 7.5 movies.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:04 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


150 GB is 1.2x10^12 bits.

if you started to count every bit in 150 GB and you counted one per second, you'd be counting for about 38,000 years.

10^12 is also the estimated number of fish in the entire ocean.
posted by vacapinta at 8:05 AM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


3 MB is an decent estimate of average file size for an MP3, so 150GB of music is 50,000 songs, or 25,000 45 RPM records, if the audience is old enough to know what a 45 is!
posted by COD at 8:13 AM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Best answer: If it was something like word docs or PDFS, it could be 11,250,000 pages of paper or 3,750 bankers boxes of paper.
posted by wocka wocka wocka at 8:22 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


As a Fruit Salesman a few years back I was encouraged to use a cabinet space analogy, wherein GBs represented the amount of available space I had in a pantry to store stuff. (Memory was equated to counter stop space, I think.) It was pretty effective IMO.
posted by Hermione Granger at 8:27 AM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Best answer: Moby Dick in .txt is 1.2 MB.

Show pictures of Moby Dick books, and use plays on quotes from the book to drive your point home.
posted by oceanjesse at 8:45 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


There are 150 million American men, so you get 1000 bytes for each one. Maybe a small photo? So it could hold photos of every American man.
posted by smackfu at 9:55 AM on December 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


A high-definition movie on a Blu-ray disc is around 20GB, so 150GB is about 7.5 movies.

I think we should bear in mind that not everybody understands or appreciates the difference between SD and High Def. A normal single-sided DVD is 4.7 GBs a pop, so 150 GBs is equal to about 30-32 standard-def movies.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:09 AM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


From the title text of an xkcd comic featuring a 16GB MicroSD card:
    "That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library."

Also, the original iPod was 5 GB, but Apple would just say "1,000 songs in your pocket."


Tangentially: When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx?

posted by jander03 at 12:45 PM on December 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Wow--you guys are awesome. Lots of great ideas here. Thanks.
posted by Mrs. Rattery at 3:11 PM on December 4, 2015


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