Skip to content

Could it really?

January 24, 2010

According to the Title Text (hover your mouse over the comic to read it), the entire iTunes music library could fit in a soda can’s worth of Micro SD cards. Could it really?

The numbers:

  • Micro SD cards measure 15 mm x 11 mm x 1 mm.
  • Soda cans have a diameter of approximately 65 mm.
  • iTunes Store catalog has more than 10^6 songs. (This figure does not include podcasts and video.)

The computations:

Each Micro SD card has a volume of 15mm x 11mm x 1mm = 165 mm^3.

Each soda can has a volume of 12 fluid ounces. Google tells me 165 mm^3 in ounces is 0.00557931375, meaning 2150 Micro SD cards could fit in a 12 ounce container. Allowing for the fact a Micro SD card is rigid and a mess of ‘em won’t completely fill a soda can, let’s round that down to 2000 Micro SD cards.

Micro SD cards come in sizes up to 32 GB. 32 GB * 2000 = 64,000 Gigabytes. There are 10^3 Gigabytes in a Terabyte, so that’s 64 Terabytes of storage in a single soda can.

Songs in iTunes are around 4 Megabytes in size. 64 Terabytes / 4 Megabytes = 16,777,216 songs.

Given that the iTunes library worldwide has 10 million songs and 16 million could fit in a soda can, the comic’s claim seems to hold.

Cool!

About these ads

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,216 other followers

%d bloggers like this: