Posted on 11/05/2009 8:47:30 AM PST by IronKros
In Utah, the National Security Agency is building a $2 billion storage facility that will house and analyze all forms of electronic communication...a potential yottabyte of everyone's (formerly) personal data. So how big is a yottabyte? CrunchGear puts it well:
There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB.
In terms of data on current human scales, a yottabyte is nearly infinite (though I'm sure the NSA will manage to fill the thing in like 2 weeks, and iPods will come with yottabytes in just a few months).
To be fair, the yottabyte figure is just one estimate generated by a Pentagon think tank. The facility could hold a mere hundreds of petabytes. But either way, the prospect is as unsustainable as it is frightening. This one facility will burn through as much electricity as the entirety of Salt Lake City.
All of this data comes from the book The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid. And while the paranoid among you may read it, I, MARK WILSON, HAVE NO REASON TO FEAR THE NSA'S INVOLVEMENT IN MY LIFE OR INFORMATION AT ALL.
More than 100,000 GB per man, woman and child on Earth.
And the ACLU weighs in ... crickets playing a tune.
Yottabyte sounds like a Dr. Suess word to me.
I had a porn stash that big once.
Not impressed.
Worth keeping in mind when you're freaking out about the implications of this. (Freaking out is not an abnormal response, either.)
Sounds like too much data to be useful - like trying to find a specific spec of plankton in an ocean.
Just wait until the Citizen's courts need the data on the hostile man down the street, who has a yard sign negative of Dear Leader. Surely something he has said or done in the last 20 years will prove what an enemy of the people he is.
I’m willing to wager that some company has gone to the ends of the earth to sell them on this YOTTABYTE concept and how it’ll work. Personally, I’d also wager that it never works as advertised, and problems erupt on day one....with several dozen people continually tramping over each other and crashing various drives on a hour-by-hour basis.
One bad file directory pointer and a yottabyte becomes a nottabyte.
The mass of the earth is about 5.9742 × 1024 kg
Hope this puts things in perspective.
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That was my point about Total Information Awareness a few years ago - it would have been way too much data to mine to look for terrorist activity. But if you have a specific lookup key, such as the SSN of a political opponent...
This is a practical impossibility given current storage technology, and even at the current growth rate of storage technology not possible for a very long time.
On an earlier thread I did a calculation of about $90 trillion dollars worth of 2 TB hard drives at retail. Of course the 3.7 terawatts of power it would take to run those 500 billion drives at idle is another matter.
If we got our storage technology down to one nanometer (it’s running in the 30s now), and we could actually store a bit every square nanometer (it doesn’t work that way, as control lines and error correction are needed), it would still take eight square kilometers of silicon to hold this much data.
Hm. And where is this data going to come from, and how will it be obtained?
Is this merely the latest chapter in the saga that began with Echelon and Magic Lantern?
I have a 2Tb drive on my desk, it is half the size in physical dimensions, but twice the storage. I remember the 20 Mb drive I had in my PC 25 years ago it was about the size of this 2Tb unit. So in another 25 years we can expect 1Yb drives? I have this feeling that before 1Yb drives are the norm we will have some new tech that replaces the mechanical/magnetic storage devices we have today.
Correct. Which is why the UK Government now has the ISPs and other providers keep records for them. It is much easier to mine individual companies for information instead of one giant mega-uber-database.
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