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so how big a data center would it take to store, cool and operate more than 300 billion 4TB hard drives.
by iamthepieman 13y ago
so how big a data center would it take to store, cool and operate more than 300 billion 4TB hard drives.
- chiph 13y agoLooking around on the EMC website, they have a product that can put 1.9 PB in a 40U rack. So that's 5.26 x 10^8 racks. Each rack consumes about 18 sq ft. of floor space (includes room for aisles, servicing, etc.), so doing the math, it comes out to 339 square miles. Assuming just one floor. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%285.26+x+10%5E8%29+*+18+sq+ft http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%285.26+x+10%5E8%29+*+1... What does this tell me? Either the NSA has storage that is 2 or more orders of magnitude denser than current industry parts, or that a lot of their data is not in online storage - it's been moved to tape for warehouse storage (but LTO v6 is not as dense as hard drive - only 2.5TB in a larger device, so the warehouse would still be huge...) Or most likely, the NSA just doesn't have 1 YB in their data center. Think about the disruption there would be in the hard drive market by someone buying 3.1 billion hard drives, even if they spaced out their purchases. And coming after the factories in Thailand were flooded a few years ago, with the shortage that happened. So what if they used data compression on disk? Assume they got 90% compression (english text, voice, etc are pretty compressible), that means they only need 1/10th the number of drives. Wolfram Alpha says their data center space requirements go down to 34 square miles. Ok, a big savings. But it's still an area the size of Manhattan.