3 ms·

A yottabyte would take 3.333×10^11 3 terabyte hard disks. A 3.5 inch hard disk has a volume of 376.77344 cm³. The NSA buildings in Bluffdale take up around 1.

by eco 13y ago

A yottabyte would take 3.333×10^11 3 terabyte hard disks. A 3.5 inch hard disk has a volume of 376.77344 cm³. The NSA buildings in Bluffdale take up around 1.5 million square feet. That means just the hard discs for a yottabyte would be just a bit less than a kilometer high (901 meters). That's about a 100 meters taller than Burj Khalifa. I think it's unlikely it's designed for anything near a yottabyte.

Amadou 13y ago
Clearly they do not yet have a yottabyte worth of data. It would be silly to build a warehousing site like that and have it be full-up with data the day it first opens for business. I expect these sizing claims (which presumably come from some sort of government statements about the facility) are based on a timeline on the order of ten years or more. A YB in 2024 is going to take a lot less physical space than a YB in 2014.
- eco 13y ago
  You'd need a 2-3 order of magnitude increase in storage density to get anywhere near reasonable. I suspect that's not going to happen in 10 years but I don't know the current and projected rates of storage density increases.
  - Amadou 13y ago
    Last I read, storage capacity per dollar has been increasing faster than Moore's Law over the last decade or so. I tracked down what appears to be the origin of these yottabyte claims: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/nov/05/whos-in-big-brothers-database/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/nov/05/whos-in... Based on that, it sounds like the yottabyte claims refer to raw, unprocessed data collected. Off the bat, I'm willing to believe in a 2 orders of magnitude decrease after data reduction techniques are applied to the raw data. My experience with data collected from telescopes was that we got about 100:1 reduction on the raw data versus what went into permanent storage. The San Antonio site was news to me, though obviously no big secret since that book was published years ago.

by eco 13y ago

Amadou 13y ago

Clearly they do not yet have a yottabyte worth of data. It would be silly to build a warehousing site like that and have it be full-up with data the day it first opens for business. I expect these sizing claims (which presumably come from some sort of government statements about the facility) are based on a timeline on the order of ten years or more. A YB in 2024 is going to take a lot less physical space than a YB in 2014.

eco 13y ago
You'd need a 2-3 order of magnitude increase in storage density to get anywhere near reasonable. I suspect that's not going to happen in 10 years but I don't know the current and projected rates of storage density increases.
- Amadou 13y ago
  Last I read, storage capacity per dollar has been increasing faster than Moore's Law over the last decade or so. I tracked down what appears to be the origin of these yottabyte claims: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/nov/05/whos-in-big-brothers-database/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/nov/05/whos-in... Based on that, it sounds like the yottabyte claims refer to raw, unprocessed data collected. Off the bat, I'm willing to believe in a 2 orders of magnitude decrease after data reduction techniques are applied to the raw data. My experience with data collected from telescopes was that we got about 100:1 reduction on the raw data versus what went into permanent storage. The San Antonio site was news to me, though obviously no big secret since that book was published years ago.