Page 162 - (DK) I Can’t Believe It! 2

160
How many books

can you fit on a

flash drive?

A 1-terabyte (TB) flash drive

can store the text of 1 million
books. One terabyte is just over
1 million megabytes (MB),

or more than 1 trillion bytes.

A flash drive weighs less than
1.1 oz (30 g) but can hold 1 TB
of data. Flash memory can be
erased and reprogrammed A 1-TB
thousands of times. flash drive
could store
1 million
200-page
books.

ATOMIC DATA STORAGE

Seen here under a powerful
electron microscope is the
world’s smallest data storage
unit. Scientists have used just
12 iron atoms to hold one bit
(the basic unit of information),
and 96 atoms to hold a byte.
A hard disk still needs half a
billion atoms per byte.

US_160_161_309600_ICBT_Flash_drive.indd 160 19/12/17 2:36 pm