What are the paper equivalents of a byte megabyte etc?

Answer 1

Generally speaking, your computer usually stores one character as one byte (including spaces, apostrophies, etc). So, if you hand-write 50 characters per line on a 25-line sheet of paper, you will write about 1250 bytes worth of information. Broken down, that's about 1k worth of data.

Using the above assumption that 1kB = 1 sheet of paper, a MB is thus 2 reams (1000 sheets) of paper. As ream is about 2 inches thick, a MB thus is about a 2-inch high pile of US letter-size paper, if we're being compact and writing on both sides.

Taking that a bit further, a standard 4-drawer filing cabinet with 2-foot deep drawers can hold about 48 reams of paper, thus 1GB takes up about 21 filing cabinets. A standard 10 x 10 foot room can hold (with walking aisles) about 3 rows of 5 filing cabinets (twice that if double stacked), so a fully-stacked 10 x 10 room holds 30 filing cabinets. So, 1TB requires around 700 such rooms.

The former World Trade Center Towers (the largest private office buildings in terms of floor space) consisted of over 2 million square feet of usable floor space each. So, each tower would have been able to hold about 28.5TB of data on double-sided paper.

The world's largest electronic data storage systems are currently rapidly approaching the exabyte size (a GB of GB). In paper terms, this would require a office building built in a cube, almost 1.75 miles on each side, filled with those 10 x 10 rooms of filing cabinets. Or, if all the reams of paper were laid out on the ground side-by-side, they would cover over 23,000 square miles, about half the state of Pennsylvania. If laid out end-to end (long end to long end), those reams would circle the world at the equator almost 7,000 times. If stacked on top of each other, a pile of paper reams holding 1EB of data would be over 31 million miles tall, or about one-third of the way from the Earth to the Sun - or, about three light-minute in length.

In terms of weight, 1 ream of US Letter paper rated as

"20lbs" actually weighs 5 lbs. So, 1 EB worth of paper reams would weigh 2.5 Billion tons. Or, roughly the weight of the entire U.S. Navy's combat ships.