Sunday, March 15, 2009

Sunday Trivia

The answer to yesterday's question is:
Barbara Bach.

Today's question is:
How much data will a standard CD hold?

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Somewhere around 700 meg.

Dustin Stetina said...

700 megabytes

Stopped Clock said...

650 or 700 megabytes depending on the design of the disc.

CDs were invented by Sony in the year 1978 but took a long time to go mainstream due to the public's unwillingness to accept a type of media that could not be recorded over or copied. The record industry, of course, loved it.

Eric W. said...

700mb.

DVDs hold 4.7GB. Dual layer DVDs are twice that. Blu-Ray is 25GB single layer, 50GB dual layer.

Zip drives are 100mb, Floppies were most commonly 1.44mb.

I can keep going, but I've got to leave you some trivia questions, don't I?

KauaiMark said...

That all depends if you allow or don't allow data compression to be used on the data first.

Fritz J. said...

I think they advertise them as 700 MB, but actual storage is a few megabytes more, like two or three megabytes more.

Forest said...

800MB.

Anonymous said...

I thought it was 550 MB...ish.

Anonymous said...

"How much data will a standard CD hold?"

Oooh ... this sounds like a word problem.

So ... standard CDs are 5¼" in diameter. The best way to hold data on one of them would be to place it horizontally on something big and flat like a table. Then you want to stack high capacity media on top ... I'm going to pick Blu-Ray disks because they are the same size.

The question now becomes, "How many Blu-Ray disks can I stack on top of a standard CD before the tower topples over."

Without knowing the manufacturing tolerances, I don't think we can answer this question exactly. My estimate (I'm going for partial credit now ...) is between 1,000 and 10,000 disks at 50 GB per disk (I'm assuming no wind or earthquakes).

So ... 50-500 TB.

-Mark Roulo

Darren said...

Mark, give yourself some extra credit for entertaining me!

Eric, go play outside more :-)