5 ms·

There is nothing impossible about it. We barely scratched the surface of data storage mechanisms. All it takes is another few breakthroughs and we likely can st

There is nothing impossible about it. We barely scratched the surface of data storage mechanisms. All it takes is another few breakthroughs and we likely can store all of Youtube of all times in a block the size of an ice cube.

boogies 6y ago
What makes you so confident? SSD tech is experiencing scaling challenges¹. IIRC DNA’s supposed to be incredibly dense and last long, but too expensive for much more than wedding photos². Do you have a more promising emerging tech in mind? 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393293 2: I think I heard this use case predicted on some NPR thing I can't find, but this one https://www.npr.org/2013/01/24/170082404/shall-i-encode-thee-in-dna-sonnets-stored-on-double-helix https://www.npr.org/2013/01/24/170082404/shall-i-encode-thee... says “Agilent waived the cost of DNA synthesis for this project, but the researchers estimate it would normally cost about $12,400 per megabyte. "It's an unthinkably large amount of money ... at the moment," Goldman says.”
- perl4ever 6y ago
  >$12,400 per megabyte I believe the first hard drive cost about $100K/MB in today's money.
K2h 6y ago
The Sandisk microSD card SDSQXCZ-1T00 rated at 1TB for MSRP of $400 is listed at sdcard.org as physical dimensions of 11 x 15 x 1.0 mm, Approx 0.5g. That is 165 mm^2. If a medium ice cube is 25 x 25 x 32 mm for a volume of 20,000 mm^2 - then today an 'ice cube' could hold 20,000 / 165 = 121 TB with normal off the shelf accessible technology for $48K USD.
- ranma42 6y ago
  Given that ~1 hour of video is uploaded to youtube per second and assuming 5mbit/s for the video data, then you can store under a days worth of youtube videos on that current-day ice cube (it will be full in about ~15 hours worth of uploads (if I didn't miscalculate)).
  - gibolt 6y ago
    Don't forget that Google stores probably at least 3 copies of each for redundancy and multiple sizes. Wouldn't want your only ice cube to melt
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      But also under aggressive and exotic compression.

boogies 6y ago

What makes you so confident? SSD tech is experiencing scaling challenges¹. IIRC DNA’s supposed to be incredibly dense and last long, but too expensive for much more than wedding photos². Do you have a more promising emerging tech in mind? 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393293 2: I think I heard this use case predicted on some NPR thing I can't find, but this one https://www.npr.org/2013/01/24/170082404/shall-i-encode-thee-in-dna-sonnets-stored-on-double-helix https://www.npr.org/2013/01/24/170082404/shall-i-encode-thee... says “Agilent waived the cost of DNA synthesis for this project, but the researchers estimate it would normally cost about $12,400 per megabyte. "It's an unthinkably large amount of money ... at the moment," Goldman says.”

perl4ever 6y ago
>$12,400 per megabyte I believe the first hard drive cost about $100K/MB in today's money.

K2h 6y ago

The Sandisk microSD card SDSQXCZ-1T00 rated at 1TB for MSRP of $400 is listed at sdcard.org as physical dimensions of 11 x 15 x 1.0 mm, Approx 0.5g. That is 165 mm^2. If a medium ice cube is 25 x 25 x 32 mm for a volume of 20,000 mm^2 - then today an 'ice cube' could hold 20,000 / 165 = 121 TB with normal off the shelf accessible technology for $48K USD.

ranma42 6y ago
Given that ~1 hour of video is uploaded to youtube per second and assuming 5mbit/s for the video data, then you can store under a days worth of youtube videos on that current-day ice cube (it will be full in about ~15 hours worth of uploads (if I didn't miscalculate)).
- gibolt 6y ago
  Don't forget that Google stores probably at least 3 copies of each for redundancy and multiple sizes. Wouldn't want your only ice cube to melt
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    But also under aggressive and exotic compression.