A Yottabyte of Storage Per Year by 2013 246
Lucas123 writes "David Roberson, general manager of Hewlett-Packard's StorageWorks division, predicts that by 2013 the storage industry will be shipping a yottabyte (a billion gigabytes) of storage capacity annually. Roberson made the comment in conjunction with HP introducing a new rack system that clusters together four blade servers and three storage arrays with 820TB of capacity. Many vendors are moving toward this kind of platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup XIV, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters."
In a Galaxay Close to Home (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home (Score:2, Informative)
Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home (Score:4, Funny)
10^18 bytes ... isn't that "Exabyte"? (Score:5, Informative)
Unless we're talking about the British "billion"?
Re:10^18 bytes ... isn't that "Exabyte"? (Score:4, Informative)
Gotta Yotta? (Score:2)
Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home (Score:3, Funny)
Usage:
Q: "How much hard drive space is on that box?"
A: "Ah, no worries, it has a shitload of space on it."
Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home (Score:3, Funny)
I propose, for the sake of simplicity, and in accordance with the metric system, that a cubic shitload holds one fucktonne of water.
Yottabyte Fhtagn (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yottabyte Fhtagn (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home (Score:3, Funny)
Impressed (Score:3, Interesting)
there's something like 10^49 atoms on earth, and we'll only be able to access the crust of which only 5% is iron, and 80% of the earth is covered with water. so if we assume as a wild as guess that perhaps a part in a trillion of the earth can be made into disk drives then we have
1E37 atoms available for disk drives.
if each yottbyte drive weighs say 1/5 of a kilo and we assume it's built out mainly carbon and has say a mean weight of 20 amu per atom then this is like
6E21 atoms
therefore one could build no more than
1E15 drives all total.
Thinking about this number it also makes me wonder about how McDonalds got all those hamburgers.
Maybe I boofed the math or assumptions. Good thing this is slashdot and I know people will kindly correct me
Re:Impressed (Score:2)
1E34 drives.
so that's 100 atoms per drive.
Some how I don't think so.
Re:Recycling (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, we're only off by a factor of 1 million (Score:3, Informative)
A yottabyte [wikipedia.org] is not "a billion gigabytes." How about trying to confirm or understand the numbers your post, before you slap them on the front page?
The binary prefix giga = 10243
The binary prefix yotta = 10248
That means a yottabyte is 10245 gigabytes, or roughly one million billion gigabytes.
Re:Hey, we're only off by a factor of 1 million (Score:2)
One trillion = 1000^4.
One million billion = 1000^5.
I'm waiting until 2015 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm waiting until 2015 (Score:2)
The new term (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The new term (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The new term (Score:2)
Re:The new term (Score:3, Funny)
If it's idiotic you want then it's idiotic you get. "My computer storage has Yobibitybobityboodidybytes."
What's infinity divided by zero?
Re:The new term (Score:2)
Re:The new term (Score:2)
Re:The new term (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yobibyte [wikipedia.org]
Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed (Score:5, Informative)
or 10^12 * 10^12
I thought geeks hung out here......
Re:Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed (Score:2)
Re:Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed (Score:2, Interesting)
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says that a yottabyte is, as you say, not a billion but a quadrillion gigabytes (10^24).
The write-up gets this wrong, but so does the article... in a different way. (It says that a yottabyte is "a thousand exabytes", when it's really a million exabytes. An exabyte is 10^18.)
WTF.
Re:Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed (Score:2)
A billion Gigabytes? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta [wikipedia.org]
Oh and btw, (Score:2)
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta [wikipedia.org]
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:3, Informative)
FAIL all around
A billion gigabytes would be an exabyte. A billion terrabytes would be zettabyte. A trillion terabytes or a quadrillion gigabytes would be a yottabyte.
Wikipedia to the rescue [wikipedia.org]
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
Remember, guys, "Billion" [wikipedia.org] means two different things [Seven if you believe the ebonic rednecks at wikipedia]depending on which part of the world you're in, so make sure you're not getting into a debate between an american [uncyclopedia.org] and a brit [uncyclopedia.org] who are both probably right [uncyclopedia.org] and wrong [uncyclopedia.org] at the same time.
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that the UK now applies the short scale interpretation exclusively in mass media and official usage.
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
I know, it's ambiguous and most people accept it as being a thousand million, but it's always worth keeping it in mind when people are arguing about what a billion of something is.
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
I've never even found an old person who still uses billion to mean "million million" - it's been standard to use it as 1,000,000,000 for thirty odd years so I would have thought the old meaning would be very nearly dead!
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
It's like how we officially use the metric system to adhere to EU law, yet we still go down the pub for a pint, dealers still sell ounces and most people drive in miles, not kilometres.
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
Re:A billion Gigabytes? (Score:2)
Messing up prefixes like this on a tech site is just embarrassing. If I wanted to see drastic mis-estimations of orders of magnitudes, I'd read PCWorld.
Yottabytes (Score:3, Funny)
A billion gigabytes? (Score:2)
Re:A billion gigabytes? (Score:5, Interesting)
God, that hurts my head. I remember being at a university seminar in '91 or so, and one of the presenters was talking about petabytes.
At the time, it drew blank expressions and he had to explain that it was the one after terabytes (since that was an abstraction to most people).
I often find myself awed by just how much you can buy nowadays cheaply. I'm told that at Costco nowadays, you can buy a terabye of disk storage for about $250 CDN -- that's utterly mind-boggling to someone who remembers single-density, single-sided floppy drives.
Crazy stuff.
Cheers
Re:A billion gigabytes? (Score:2)
Yes. I bought a 1TB "drive" (it's actually two drives in a RAID configuration) with an ARM processor running Linux from CostCo, and connect to it via samba and nfs, all for $320. They're now selling a 2TB unit for about $430.
I've also ordered a new machine with a 1TB drive from a nearby small computer store - that one is about $340 for a single SATA drive.
I still remember spending $1800 for my first 1.2GB drive that was SCSI-based ... back in 1993.
Re:A billion gigabytes? (Score:4, Funny)
In 1986.
Good gravy, I remember the music and pants back then.
Nooooooooo!
Re:A billion gigabytes? (Score:2)
I know what you mean. My first computer, back in the late 80's, had a "HUGE" 40MB hard drive. (Yes, MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes for you youngsters out there.) I have a 1GB SD card sitting on my desk right now. That's more than 25 times the space of my first desktop computer and it can fit in my shirt pocket. And that's not even the biggest SD card out there. I often try to picture how high I would need to stack those old desktop computers to get the same storage space.
Awhile back, I saw this photo of an old 1GB hard drive compared with a 1GB SD card: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/changing-times/this-is-what-1gb-of-storage-looks-like-now-and-20-years-ago-302856.php [gizmodo.com]
Imagine what the comparison photos will look like in 20 years!
Re:A billion gigabytes? (Score:2)
Re:A billion gigabytes? (Score:3, Funny)
Luxury!!
Why, I once got my tie caught in the gears of the difference engine [wikipedia.org], and had to stay there until we hit the last digit of the calculation -- I was there for days.
Cheers
Yottabyte? (Score:2, Funny)
And at the other end of the spectrum you have the nybble.
Which billions? Which gigabytes? (Score:2, Insightful)
- 10^9 * 10^9 bytes
- 2^30 * 2^30 bytes
- 10^9 * 2^30 bytes
- 10^12 * 2^30 bytes (non-american billions)
-
You never know, these days
Re:Which billions? Which gigabytes? (Score:2, Funny)
More pr0n than you can even imagine
I Believe It (Score:2)
I wouldn't be too surprised if we hit 10TB arrays next year, so this kind of progression seems like it's possible. Data's cheap nowadays!
Re:I Believe It (Score:2)
There are a lot larger arrays than 10TB for sale. The company I order servers from at work delivers standard configurations up to 24TB, and the only reason they don't offer anything larger is that their customer base is mainly relatively small companies that wouldn't need it. IBM sells "off the shelf" systems that can scale to at least 512TB...
Heck, I've got the space for more than 10TB worth of RAID5 storage in my home machine, just no use for it (might come in handy for heating come winter, though...)
Re:I Believe It (Score:2)
Re:I Believe It (Score:2)
Re:I Believe It (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a lot of storage. (Score:2)
I refuse to dump floppies until then.
Re:That's a lot of storage. (Score:2)
How high would a yottabyte stack of eight inch floppies reach? I don't even remember how much data an eight inch floppy held. I do remember a five inch one held 360k.
Hell, lots of these kids don't remember when floppies were floppy on the outside as well as on the inside.
Re:That's a lot of storage. (Score:2)
So confused (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So confused (Score:2)
Lottabyte (Score:2, Insightful)
Lottabyte: An unspecific term meaning the amount of storage you think you need but know you can't afford.
Re:Lottabyte (Score:3, Funny)
Illegal? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Lottabyte (Score:3, Funny)
Or in the vernacular: Crapload
Shit (Score:4, Funny)
New prefixes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:New prefixes (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully it will come down to unobyte, dosbyte, or something with a number convention, otherwise we might be hearing "crazybyte" or "uberbyte".
Um, so how much is it? (Score:2)
Can some one show me how many kilobytes are in yottabyte?
Will this be unit of measure just for companies like Google or MS only or are we talking about yottabyte flash drives?
Re:Um, so how much is it? (Score:2)
Can some one show me how many kilobytes are in yottabyte? Will this be unit of measure just for companies like Google or MS only or are we talking about yottabyte flash drives?
You'll likely see a yottabyte flash drive in your lifetime. I remember when people were gasping at the IBM XT's incredibly huge 10 meg hard drive.
A list for your edification (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, I emailed them this link to the terms [techtarget.com] in question, and post it here, for your edification. I have a post-it note on my bookcase with these terms - I think that as time goes on, knowing EXACTLY what each one is will be of some use. Until the oil runs out and we are shivering in the cold, anyway...
Here's their names, abreviations and their power of ten, so you know how big/small it is.
yocto- y 10^-24
zepto- z 10^-21
atto- a 10^-18
femto- f 10^-15
pico- p 10^-12
nano- n 10^-9
micro- m 10^-6
milli- m 10^-3
centi- c 10^-2
deci- d 10^-1
(none) -- --
deka- D 10^1
hecto- H 10^2
kilo- K 10^3
mega- M 10^6
giga- G 10^9
tera- T 10^12
peta- P 10^15
exa- E 10^18
zetta- Z 10^21
yotta- Y 10^24
RS
Re:A list for your edification (Score:2, Funny)
we now know a yottapede has A LOT of legs...
but we're left wondering what a yoctopus would look like.
How much is currently being shipped annually? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How much is currently being shipped annually? (Score:2)
That's a yotta porn (Score:2)
Bigger, Not Faster (Score:3, Informative)
But personal drives don't need as high speeds for one person's use, especially when the high capacity is for large media content objects that are stored unfragmented. We don't need to spend the money on transfer speeds so much faster than our playback speeds that it's never used. Large builtin caches are useful for real random-access data in small chunks, like programs or numerical datasets, not media.
Blu-Ray's max transfer speed is 54Mbps [wikipedia.org], though that's for recording - 48Mbps is max playback. 3x for buffering during FWD/REV scanning playback would be 144Mbps, 2.25MBps. Big drives currently recommended for personal use, like Seagate's 1TB Barracuda ES.2 [storagereview.com], get at least 53MBps transfer, over 23x as fast as the fastest it will ever really be asked to deliver. If it weren't so unnecessarily fast, maybe it would cost less, and an array of them for the same hundreds of dollars would hold more content.
With 50GB Blu-Ray HD titles to store, getting more sets of 20 titles in each HD in a RAID is a lot more important than getting them faster than they can be played.
Prefixes (Score:2)
SearchStorage Definitions [techtarget.com]
Extreme prefixes [lewrockwell.com]
This last one mentions even higher prefixes like vendeka (10^33).
Yoda-Byte. (Score:2, Funny)
Flash is the path to the bad sector. Flash leads to wear. wear leads to damage. damage leads to lost data.
In related news ... (Score:2)
Dumbest prefix of all time !! (Score:2)
Got to love the explaination (Score:2)
Anyway, either this article or wikipedia is wrong because the article on Yottabyte [wikipedia.org] says: "In fact, the combined space of all the computer hard drives in the world does not amount to even one zettabyte. According to one study, all the world's computers stored approximately 160 exabytes in 2006, with nearly 1 zettabyte projected by 2010."
Someone here is off by about three orders of magnitude...
Re:Finally... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Finally... (Score:2)
Re:I think (Score:2)
Re:In my server (Score:2)
Re:A better metric (Score:2)
Re:It's still not enough (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yatta? (Score:2)
Re:Yatta? (Score:2)
Try the Yotta Mac [geocities.com]!
Re:How do they get this number? (Score:2)
Probably the article is wrong. Semiconductor storage will double every 18 months or so (Moore's law - double the transistors --> double the storage, roughly). Spinning disk storage seems to double almost yearly these days - a couple of years ago, a 500GB drive was expensive, then last year, 500GB drives are extremely common while 1TB drives were pricey. In between, we have such monsters as 750GB disks. It's one of the barriers that SSD faces - until spinning disk storage capacity stops growing faster than Moore's Law, there's not much chance SSD can catch up.
Also, you missed out on this being "shipped" storage. We're making more hard drives than ever. Even if technology doesn't progress, if you ship 10x more hard drives this year than last year, you shipped 10x more storage.
The big question is - how big is the difference between a Yottabyte (YB) and a Yottabibyte (YiB)?
Re:How do they get this number? (Score:2, Informative)
That still gives 1 YB by 2019..
Yeah, that might be it. But to me it seems more likely that the article meant something other than the "yotta" preffix
Yobibyte, officially. It's 1 YiB = 1.208 YB, see the wikipedia link [wikipedia.org]. They're still close enough in relative terms to use interchangeably when referring to orders of magnitude, but the absolute difference is a few everything-humanity-has-ever-stored units.
Re:Should have been... (Score:2)