4 x 2.5 inch drives = 1 petabyte. Some years back, I read this short PR style article[1] about how the LHC produces 10 petabyes of data per second. Which was (

4 x 2.5 inch drives = 1 petabyte. Some years back, I read this short PR style article[1] about how the LHC produces 10 petabyes of data per second. Which was (then) impossible to store in any meaningful way. So the folks at CERN came up with a clever triggering system that discarded 99.9+% of the data. Now a wimpy 50 racks can provide minutes (well ~2.5 minutes) of buffer. A well planned 'university scale' data center could give them close to an hour. And a proper state-of-the-art hyper-scale data center would get dangerously close to a day. Wild. [1]: https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-quark/ https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-quark/