How much storage do Mini-DV files take up?
Have you ever wondered how much storage is required for mini-dv footage? In today's world, it's not as much as you might think.
Mini-DV requires approximately 1 gigabyte of storage for every 5 minutes. This may sound like a lot. But consider this, the typical retail cost of a 250 gigabyte hard-drive costs around $150.00. This means for $150.00 you can hold roughly 1250 minutes of dv storage, or 20 hours of media.
Think about this. It may be cheaper to archive all of your DV media on a hard-drive instead of tape. Hour long DV tapes can cost as much as $10.00 per tape. To give you an idea of how far hard-disk technology has advanced, take a look at this old 9 gig hard-drive that used to cost as much as $10,000. This was the price 10 years ago!
We are now approaching the hard-drive capacity that could archive all words ever spoken by human beings. That's a scary thought. Here are some extra facts about storage capacities.
A binary decision 1 bit
A single text character 1 byte
A typical text word 10 bytes
A typewritten page 2 kilobyte s ( KB s)
A short novel 1 megabyte ( MB )
The complete works of Shakespeare 5 megabytes
A collection of the works of Beethoven 20 gigabytes
A library floor of academic journals 100 gigabytes
An academic research library 2 terabytes
The print collections of the U.S. Library of Congress 10 terabytes
The National Climactic Data Center database 400 terabytes
All U.S. academic research libraries 2 petabytes
All printed material in the world 200 petabytes
All words ever spoken by human beings 5 exabytes
