While storage media has changed beyond all recognition from tapes via 7 inch, 4.35 inch, 3.5 inch floppies to hard drives in various formats and more removable cards and devices than you can shake a stick at, the physical size of storage media has had one inexorable trend: getting smaller while the capacity increases.

The 3.5 floppy (which had a hard shell) is so embedded in our psyche that it remains the standard icon for "save" in computer programs, notwithstanding that many of today's users say "floppy disk? Whats that?" and have never seen a computer with a floppy drive installed.

A floppy disk drive held 1.44MB of data. And that was enough for sizeable libraries of documents, for large spreadsheets and reasonable sized databases. In fact, only images gave us much of a problem. And they were removable and therefore portable. The first hard drive in office, in 1986, stored all the programs and data we needed on 10mb.

So, what's a terabyte? It's one million million (a true billion, not as may claim a "trillion") bytes. Note that it's a multiple of bytes, not of megabytes because a megabyte is not a thousand bytes, as many think, but 1024 (that, and the "a million million is not a trillion" thing, all rely on numbers to the power of x).

So that little floppy dist held 1.44*1024 bytes which is 1474.56. For the sake of simplicity, let's call that 1475. To get the number of floppy disks required to hold one true billion bytes, let's take 1,000,000,000,000 and divide by 1475. We get 677966101.694915254. Let's call that 677,966,100. Five floppy disks in a pile measure 16mm (yes, there are some floppy disks on this newsdesk!) That means that the data that now fits on a 1TB SSD which would almost fit in the credit card slot in your wallet would need a pile of floppies 211864406.779661017 millimetres tall. In round figures, that's 212 metres. A typical residential apartment block has floors of approx 3 metres. 212/3=71 storeys. That's a very big building. But today, you can drop it in your pocket and it won't even make a bulge.

Now you can see how much data has been stolen.

But it's not only the data that's an issue: as a result of the data breach, Western Digital shut down at least part of its cloud network and took 10 days to return it to full effect.

But it goes further: the hackers gained information that would enable them to "dox" Western Union Executives.

The hackers who contacted Western Digital said that they chose to steal and hold to ransom data rather than to infect WD with malware because they wanted to get money not cause lasting harm.

Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/13/hackers-claim-vast-access-to-western-…