IBM Builds Biggest Data Drive Ever

IBM Builds Biggest Data Drive Ever

Tom Simonite, writing for MIT’s Technology Review:

A data repository almost 10 times bigger than any made before is being built by researchers at IBM’s Almaden, California, research lab. The 120 petabyte “drive”—that’s 120 million gigabytes—is made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

Petabytes? Sounds like a dinosaur vitamin for children. How big is 120 of them?

A 120 petabyte drive could hold 24 billion typical five-megabyte MP3 files or comfortably swallow 60 copies of the biggest backup of the Web, the 150 billion pages that make up the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine.

60 copies of the biggest known backup of the entire web — that’s a size so large that it’s lunatic fringe, something that’s hard to get your head around.  Reminds me of the now-famous How Big Is The Earth infovisual. Amazing.

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