Wired defines the storage 'PornYear'

Wired has thrown down the gauntlet to El Reg's Standards Soviet by defining the storage "PornYear" - equivalent to 0.94 petabytes.

Yes indeed, forget Jubs, Linguine, and the theoretical maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum - the future will be measured by the number of millions of hours of HD vid smut you can theoretically cram onto version 5 of the CompactFlash standard.

That figure is "188 petabytes of data", equalling "188,000 one-terabyte drives" or, crucially, "sufficient capacity to contain 2.7 million hours of HD video" which represents "two centuries’ worth of the porn industry’s annual output".

Wired also notes that this 188 petabyte CF will be able to suck up "seven days’ worth of AT&T’s daily traffic", or, if you had five of these monster cards, you'd be able to slurp up "all of the data currently stored on all the hard drives in home computers in the state of Minnesota".

Of course, the "AT&T" or the "Minnesota" don't have the same ring as the succulent "PornYear".

For the record, however, our calculations show that 1,000 PornYears handily equal 1 Minnesota (940 Petabytes). We therefore suggest that both standards be adopted: the former for comparatively modest levels of grumble flick storage; and the latter for millennial archiving of the US's prodigious porn output. ®

Bootnote

Thanks to Richard Smith for the tip-off.