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Dead Media

Halloween 2023 Display on obsolete computer and audio/visual media

Bits Bytes Megabytes Gigabytes

Computer storage has come a long way since the 1800s. Below is a comparison of the storage capacity of different computer media. There's some wiggle room with these capacities--for example, floppy disks initially had about half the listed amount of space, then it became possible to store information on both sides of the disk.

Comparison of storage solutions
Item Storage Capacity Percentage of total storage
capacity in this chart
Needle Card/edge-notched card (estimated) 180 bits 00.00000014%
Punch card 80 bytes 00.0000006%
8" Floppy Disk 1.2 mb 00.00902%
5¼” Floppy Disk 1.2 mb 00.00541%
3½” Floppy Disk 1.44 mb 00.0108%
Zip Disk 100mb 00.752%
CD-R 700 mb 05.26%

USB Flash Drive
(the specific one on display)

4 GB 30.1%
DVD+R 8.5 gb 63.9%
  Total storage: 13.3 GB