Gartner: In 2016, the average household has 3.3TB of data

Market research firm Gartner has calculated that an average household will have about 3.3TB of data on storage media in 2016. Mainly multimedia files will increase the required storage space.

Currently, the average is still 464GB of data per household, Gartner reports. Due to the rapid increase in required storage space and having different devices, such as tablets and smartphones, users will also store more data in the cloud. Gartner expects the percentage of data stored in the cloud to increase from the current average of 7 percent to 36 percent in 2016.

The market research firm believes social networking sites will cater to consumers’ cloud storage needs, offering free storage space. That should help make such services mainstream, leading to more consumers storing their data in the cloud.

Multimedia files in particular will increase the storage space required for consumers. According to Gartner, this is mainly due to the increase in the use of tablets and smartphones that have cameras. Incidentally, the market research firm expects that the total storage space required will increase from the current 329 exabytes, or 329 million terabytes, to approximately 4100 exabytes.