How many GB would one file cabinet hold?
This exchange was copied from:
http://www.computerforum.com/88382-how-many-gb-would-one-file-cabinet-hold.html
[11:12] My Friend: I need to slow down
[11:12] Me: O_o
[11:13] My Friend: I’ve just used 30 gig’s of storage space on music
[11:13] Me: Meh, that’s what you have me for.
[11:14] My Friend: YES!! I can delete my 30 gigs and make you sing me the song I want to hear?
[11:14] Me: Yes. Or I can supply you with all of your storage needs.
[11:14] My Friend: like a filing cabinet?
[11:15] Me: Yes
[11:15] Me: You can print off all of your data in binary and save in it a cabinet
[11:16] My Friend: weak
[11:16] My Friend: how much does that hold?
[11:16] Me: Does what?
[11:16] Me: A cabinet?
[11:16] My Friend: fo sho
[11:16] My Friend: is there like 60 gigs?
[11:16] Me: Lemme calculate
[11:17] My Friend: are you serious?
[11:17] Me: Yes
[11:17] My Friend: do it.
[11:18] Me: Well, we can say that the average song is 4MB
[11:18] My Friend: agreed
[11:18] My Friend: unless it’s a Skillet song..cause their like 7, 8MB
[11:19] Me: 4MB = 33554432 bits
[11:20] Me: One bit would be a 1 or 0
[11:20] My Friend: DUDE
[11:20] My Friend: I just finished my 30.5 GB file of 277 hip hop albums
[11:20] Me: One printed page hold approx 6460 characters
[11:22] Me: So one song would take 5194 pages
[11:22] My Friend: so..for time’s sake..we’re looking at about a .4 gig file cabinet
[11:23] Me: Doubtful
[11:24] Me: Average paper is 24lb/ream or .0048″ per sheet
[11:26] Me: So, we’re looking at about 25″ of space needed for one song
[11:27] Me: Looking at my file cabinet of average thickness, I would say that one drawer is about 18″ deep
[11:28] Me: And the average file cabinet has 4 drawers
[11:28] Me: So we’re talking 72″ of space
[11:29] Me: Or 2.89 songs per cabinet
[11:29] Me: So one cabinet holds about 11.55MB of space
[11:30] My Friend: lol, holy ****
[11:30] Me: Or, about .01128GB
[11:30] Me: Satisfied?
[11:31] My Friend: what if I wanted 30 seconds of the songs
[11:32] Me: Well, you’d have to put in some tabs
[11:32] Me: that way you could just flip to your favorite part of the song
[11:33] My Friend: good call
February 26th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
is that front and back of the page?
February 27th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Fantastic. That reminds of long road trips to Tampa from Detroit trying to calculate how many gallons of white and yellow paint were used on I-75. (Miami to Sault Ste. Marie)
February 27th, 2008 at 9:53 am
jwelch: I think so
mcshnobe: so…how many gallons was it?
February 27th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
my calculations differ. A letter sheet is 215.9 mm × 279.4 mm. Giving 5mm on all sides that becomes 206 x 269 printable area. Which is 55414 mm^2. 1 pt is a character that covers .3527 mm^2. Given 6pt as the smallest readable type, that becomes 2.116 mm^2 per character. So 55414 / 2.116 becomes 26187 characters per side. Or 52374 per sheet. That becomes 641 pages per song.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Mind you, this was some time ago and some assumptions are no longer valid… We asssumed roughly 1,700 miles of four lane divided highway. (Obviously, many places along the stretch have many more lanes these days)
Since this was well before cell phones and we didn’t carry calculators with us, made the math as easy as possible. We came up with needing about 4.5 gallons per stripe per mile. Having two solid lines on the sides and dashes down the middle we came up with needing just shy of 40,000 gallons of white paint.
We never really figured out how to count the paint on exit/entrance ramps though….
February 27th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Going backwards to see how far off we were, I back calculated the stripes to be about 5 thousandths of an inch thick. Probably a bit thin for durable reflective paint….