3 ms·
If you took all of those drives apart and put the spindles in a pile you'd have a big pile of motors. The Petabox consumes 6kW so let's be generous and call it
by skeltoac 16y ago
If you took all of those drives apart and put the spindles in a pile you'd have a big pile of motors. The Petabox consumes 6kW so let's be generous and call it 60kW of servo motors.
60kW is roughly 80hp. (I know this is a specious comparison in several ways but bear with me.) 80hp is enough power a small but highway-capable motorcycle. A single 60kW brushless DC motor weighs over 100kg. That's heavier than a good many of us HN readers.
Imagine a motor like that bolted to one long spindle of large platters--say the 99cm platters from a 1961 hard drive.
If these platters were remade with the data density of modern 2TB drives, how tall would the spindle be if this giant hard drive had a 10PB capacity? How over- or under-sized would our motor be?