3 ms·

16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes. Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available. Some random search

16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes. Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available. Some random search results say the global hard drive market is around an eighth of a billion units, but of course much of that will be smaller sizes. So that should be physically realizable today (well, with today's commercial technology), with only a few years of global production.

Dylan16807 6mo ago
> 16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes. To be clear, the first quote was talking about 2^64 bytes, and you're talking about 2^64 blocks. Edit: Though confusingly the second part talked about 2^128 blocks. Also these days I'd assume 4KB blocks instead of 512 bytes.
- tbrownaw 6mo ago
  > To be clear, the first quote was talking about 2^64 bytes That's 16 exabytes. Wikipedia cites a re:invent video to say that Amazon S3 has "100s of exabytes" in it. So it not only could theoretically be done, but has been done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3
throw0101d 6mo ago
> Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available. For the record, 44TB drives have been announced in March 2026: * https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/stories/articles/seagate-delivers-industrys-highest-capacity-hard-drives-with-next-generation-mozaic-4/ https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/stories/articles/seagate-deliv...
- extraduder_ire 6mo ago
  SSDs have outclassed hard drives in density for a while now. Kioxia claims their LC9 is over 245TB in capacity, announced July 2025.
  - throw0101d 6mo ago
    How much does one 245T LC9 cost, and much much do (245T÷44T=5.5=) six Seagates cost? I have a bunch of NVMe enclosures that generate 750W of heat when going full blast, and 600W when completely idle. How heat does the equivalent number of HDDs generate when working/idle?

Dylan16807 6mo ago

> 16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes. To be clear, the first quote was talking about 2^64 bytes, and you're talking about 2^64 blocks. Edit: Though confusingly the second part talked about 2^128 blocks. Also these days I'd assume 4KB blocks instead of 512 bytes.

tbrownaw 6mo ago
> To be clear, the first quote was talking about 2^64 bytes That's 16 exabytes. Wikipedia cites a re:invent video to say that Amazon S3 has "100s of exabytes" in it. So it not only could theoretically be done, but has been done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3

throw0101d 6mo ago

> Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available. For the record, 44TB drives have been announced in March 2026: * https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/stories/articles/seagate-delivers-industrys-highest-capacity-hard-drives-with-next-generation-mozaic-4/ https://www.seagate.com/ca/en/stories/articles/seagate-deliv...

extraduder_ire 6mo ago
SSDs have outclassed hard drives in density for a while now. Kioxia claims their LC9 is over 245TB in capacity, announced July 2025.
- throw0101d 6mo ago
  How much does one 245T LC9 cost, and much much do (245T÷44T=5.5=) six Seagates cost? I have a bunch of NVMe enclosures that generate 750W of heat when going full blast, and 600W when completely idle. How heat does the equivalent number of HDDs generate when working/idle?