At yesterday’s Seagate Satellite launch, Seagate’s BS Teh, Senior Vice President & Managing Director for Asia Pacific & Japan shared some interesting analysis of the current state of storage on mobile and PC devices. Despite the fixed memory status of the iPad, it appears that they’re still outstripping Android by nearly double.
Seagate’s a storage company, so it’s not surprising that they’d be spruiking storage generally. But some of the figures that were quoted at yesterday’s launch were interesting in their own right.
First up, for those who like really big numbers: Currently the storage industry is on track to ship around 350 Exabytes of data this year; an exabyte is 10 to the power of 18, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 if you like visualisations of zeroes.
Within three years Teh claimed that the industry would ship more than a Zettabyte, moving up to 10 to the power of 21. Or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 as the zero flies.
The more interesting direct figures were Seagate’s analysis of the average size of storage on currently purchased tablets. According to Teh, the average non-iPad tablet comes with 27.1GB of data, whereas the average iPad has 41.5GB. Before the iPad crowd starts crowing too loud, Teh also estimated that by 2014 that figure would only have risen to an average of 65GB.
Before anyone points out the blindly obvious, no, nobody sells a tablet with 27.1GB of storage; these are averages taken over the whole range of sold units. But clearly, iPad users are buying the higher capacity tablets in serious volume compared to the lower capacity ones.