As our electronically stored information (ESI) data universe continues to grow, we are hearing about increasing storage capacities. The size of a project in terabytes (TB – 1024 Gigabytes) comes up frequently and is often the amount of data that has to be collected, culled or processed on a corporate server. However, now you can purchase a 1TB drive that will fit in a laptop computer.
Have you heard of a job that will reach or exceed a petabyte? If not, you most likely will in the near future and the following will help if you aren’t familiar with the larger capacities.
Equivalent Storage in Terabytes
Petabyte = 1,024 TB
Exabyte = 1,048,576 TB
Zettabyte = 1,073,741,824 TB
Yottabyte = 1,099,511,627,776 TB
As the size of electronic data at client sites increases so will the need for refined, targeted ESI collections. Many litigation support and computer forensic professionals have encountered collection jobs that are several terabytes and are provided keyword search terms and other criteria to help identify relevant data and decrease the amount being collected, processed and hosted.