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Odd to describe this as "500m Pages" "Fifty terabytes is equivalent to 50,000 gigabytes. One gigabyte can contain 10,000 pages of documents, the department est
by alva 10y ago
Odd to describe this as "500m Pages"
"Fifty terabytes is equivalent to 50,000 gigabytes. One gigabyte can contain 10,000 pages of documents, the department estimated.
By extrapolation, 50 terabytes can hold 500 million pages."
I can't find the court filing at the moment, but I would be amazed if even a small majority of the 50TB were 'pages of documents'. Looks like he got away with databases to me.
edit: Found the filing http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf
- molecule 10y agoI'd be curious to know if and how he was able to store 50TB @ home while avoiding being a disorganized pack-rat?
- nickff 10y agoAll it would take is a few network attached storage devices with high-capacity 3.5" drives. If you have 8 drives per NAS, and each drive is 4 TB, you only need 2 NAS to store data with no redundancy or RAID 5, and 3 or 4 NAS for more redundancy. P.S. 6 TB drives are now very common, and 8TB drives are widely available, but more expensive.
- v4n4d1s 10y agoThere's a subreddit dedicated to data hoarding. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ Storage got cheap and easy to manage for regular consumers over the last few years.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- patrickg_zill 10y ago1 page of text with no graphics, is less than 2Kb. So 1MB can hold 500 pages of text; 1GB can hold 50,000 pages. 1TB can hold 50 million. 10TB can thus hold 500 million. Of course, graphics, audio, video files etc. can severely increase the size.
- alva 10y agoI agree that 10TB can hold at least 500m simple documents. Minor quibble (although bit groggy so correct me if I am wrong), but surely if 1MB holds 500, 1GB holds 500,000, 1TB 500,000,000 so 10TB holds 5 billion. I just find it unlikely that 500m (or even 5b) of normal documents detailing operations exist at a single organisation, even with attached multimedia. Certainly possible, but seems off? Databases seem like the more likely chunk of the haul. Not suggestion anything nefarious going on, just noting it is an odd way to describe the likely data.
- nickff 10y agoHillary Clinton managed to generate 60k e-mail records over 6 years; assuming a period of 8 years, and a similar rate of e-mail generation, it would only take 6250 employees to generate 500M e-mails. The NSA is estimated to have 30k-40k employees (and many contractors).
- brassic 10y ago> 1MB can hold 500 pages of text; 1GB can hold 50,000 pages You lost a factor of ten. 500 times 1000 is 500,000 so 1GB can hold 500,000 pages. 1TB can hold 500 million.
- ingsoc79 10y agoThey're just describing the data in terms that most members of Congress can understand.
- qq66 10y agoThe problem is that nobody can understand numbers that big either. Nobody can really understand what it's like to be 4 billion years old or 100,000 light years across or 500 million pages of documents.
- function_seven 10y agoI would suggest they convert to a more appropriate unit. How many LoC’s would be required to hold the stolen info?
- tptacek 10y agoI'm sure you're right, but one of the details here was that they found printed out emails in his car with handwritten notes on the back of them. They're apparently especially skeeved out by the fact that the notes include descriptions of basic tradecraft stuff --- stuff, I guess, he clearly already knew himself --- as if he was preparing them for a third party recipient.