We explore the fundamentals of digital storage and how it powers precision agriculture, covering basic bytes to the massive petabyte servers at GK Technology that store agricultural imagery and data.

• A byte equals eight binary bits and typically represents a single character or piece of data in computer language
• Digital storage units progress from kilobytes (thousand) to megabytes (million) to gigabytes (billion) to terabytes (trillion) to petabytes (thousand terabytes)
• GK Technology's Halstead office maintains a petabyte of storage containing agricultural data for most of the United States and three Canadian provinces
• Storage includes shapefile formats, NAIP imagery, Lidar data, and two satellite libraries: Landsat (30m resolution back to 1984) and Sentinel (10m resolution from 2016)
• Precision ag software users access this massive data repository when creating drainage maps or automated management zones
• Higher resolution imagery like drone photos requires significantly more storage space, creating challenges for agricultural data management

https://gktechinc.com/