According to the Internet Society, in 2020, the total amount of data on the Internet reached 5.2 zettabytes.
Those 5.2 zettabytes are equivalent to 5,400,000 Petabytes or also 5,400,000,000 Terabytes. There is a Nimbus ExaDrive DC that costs $40,000 and can store 100 TB.
If we divide the 5,400,000,000 TB by 100 TB, we get 54,000,000 units, and multiplying that by $40,000, we get $2,160,000,000,000.
And that unit for each GB costs 2.5 dollars.
You can get a 1TB drive for much less than $400
Don’t forget a backup, so 2.5x the cost
Probably more fair to go with standard enterprise drives like Exos or ultrastar
Hard to say… butI am 100% sure that adult content would be more expensive than any useful knowledge.
I mean… It kinda already is? Wikipedia and other sources of knowledge are free to use. Many porn sites are not.
Edit: I thought this is about data and not the storage media itself lol.
Obvious answer: It depends.
One individual can have TBs of storage assigned to them, like a cloud storage with years worth of high res family photos or videos, or TBs worth of… homework and Linux distros. This would be nearly useless / cost more to gather than it has a value.
On the other hand, a group of people can have mere kilobytes of text messages between them that is potentially worth millions of dollars stored on a server, like trade secrets or war plans.
A special case to consider: The data of John Doe type individuals I described first can be a valuable asset too if its not one individual but a big accumulation of thousands / millions of people, especially of they can be made comparable to one another. We see this in advertising and will probably realize this value more and more in crowd surveillance and control / opinion making. Especially if all of this data gets analyzed and reduced to machine readable tokens, possibly even on the users end devices, which means the data gets more valuable and more compact at the same time.
My final answer would be: It effectively ranges from negative to positive millions / billions of $ per any given unit.
About tree fiddy?
During the blockchain craze there were attempts of monetising distributed data storage by cryptobros renting out disk space for virtual currency. AFAICR it turned out more expensive and less reliable than most any competitive datacenter. So my guess is that it would be much less than you imagine.
I mean, you can check out disk prices to get a good reference
-.03
