What The Heck Is A Zettabyte?

[mrclose]

The internet has been abuzz about the new facility being built in Bluffdale, Utah.

It will be a Data storage center for The NSA.

It has been reported that the facility will be able to 'accumalate' (and store) 5 Zettabytes of information.

I had no idea of what or how much information was in a Zettabyte so .. I went looking!

This is some of what I found:

As of 2009, the entire World Wide Web was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes. This is one half zettabyte.

A Zettabyte is roughly equal to 250 billion DVDs or 36 million years of HD video

1 million times the contents of the world’s largest library or 1 billion terabytes.
(That's another story)

A better idea of the Zettabyte: On Google’s how search works feature, the company boasts how their index is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes. That’s 100,000 terabytes!

So figure that there are 1,073,741,824 (that's over one billion) terabytes in a Zeattabyte and .. Well, Even Google has a lot of catching up to do!


According to The Guardian, the term had to be created due to the fact that the total amount of digital content in the world grew by 62 percent last year to a total of 800,000 Petabytes, or 0.8 ZBs. 

As one description I read described it, it is enough information to fill 75 billion iPads … not that there are even that many iPads in the world!

That many ipads stacked one upon another would reach beyond the moon!

I've been talking about this Data Mining/Storage center .. now take a look at it here: http://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-of-the-nsas-utah-data-center-2013-6

Take a gander at those A/C units!

[EC]

To put it in context - your brain holds roughly 7 petabytes if you live a long and full life.

[ABX]

If this isn't an exaggeration, I would like to know what storage methods they are using. Anything conventional I can think of for that much data would use so much power it would need its own nuclear reactor. It would also need so much cooling, they would need to put it in the North Pole.

Has DARPA broken through with a more efficient data storage technology?

[truth_seeker]

So where do my beloved "gazillions" fit in this picture?

[ABX]

So where do my beloved "gazillions" fit in this picture?

The price tag

[Cincinnatus]

And the NSA needs to store all that information because...?

[EC]

And the NSA needs to store all that information because...?

That is classified, Sir.

[mrclose]

If this isn't an exaggeration, I would like to know what storage methods they are using. Anything conventional I can think of for that much data would use so much power it would need its own nuclear reactor. It would also need so much cooling, they would need to put it in the North Pole.

Has DARPA broken through with a more efficient data storage technology?

Take a look at the cooling units.
Each one is the size of a small house!

I read somewhere that they will require 3 million gallons of water per day .. just for the units?

[famousdayandyear]

wonder who got the HVAC contract?

[mrclose]

The most powerful computer the world has ever known.

That machine, the Titan Supercomputer, is capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second or 20 petaflops. (1 petaflop = 1 quadrillion instructions per second).

(Anyone ever say that The Anti-Christ 'had' to be human?)

[Atomic Cow]

This probably explains why the cost of storage devices have gone up lately, the government is buying them all.

[mrclose]

What I wanna know is .. can I get one of these pc's and will it fit on my desktop?

[Oceander]

If this isn't an exaggeration, I would like to know what storage methods they are using. Anything conventional I can think of for that much data would use so much power it would need its own nuclear reactor. It would also need so much cooling, they would need to put it in the North Pole.

Has DARPA broken through with a more efficient data storage technology?

Slower drive speeds, perhaps?

[Oceander]

According to The Guardian, the term had to be created due to the fact that the total amount of digital content in the world grew by 62 percent last year to a total of 800,000 Petabytes, or 0.8 ZBs. 

In other words, the NSA is attempting to gather every byte of digital data to analyze.  Maybe it's just me, but this seems to go far, far beyond simply finding terrorists.