How Heavy Is a Petabyte?

Jon Morgan writes "Whilst heaving around numerous data storage systems to sell (they weigh A LOT!), we got to wondering: How heavy is a Petabyte of data storage? Our best guess is 365KG, which is 6 million times lighter than in 1980! But is there a lighter way to store a Petabyte?"

There is a way!

[b4upoo]

It will take me a while but committing all that data to my memory won't add any measurable weight to me at all.

lim-0

[mattj452]

Since data storage is just one case of transmission channel (just sending it through time, not space) you can store the 6 Petabytes in a transmission. All you need to do is place one sender here, and one eh, let's say at the end of the Universe. As long as the data is being transmitted, it doesn't really weight anything. Yes silly question will get a silly answer :)

Re:MicroSD

[Animaether]

But the smaller the chipsets, the larger - relatively - the packaging becomes. You can't just keep shrinking down the packaging, after all.. it would get far too flimsy.
So what you'd really need to weigh is the actual PCB with components, but sans all but a sliver of the bit that is the connector (the copper strips etched into the PCB to function as such).

Try using Micro SD cards instead

[kroyd]

With 32gb cards weighting 0.5 grams one terabyte should require 32 cards, or 16 grams. 1024 terabytes should then weight 16384 grams, or a bit more than 16kg.

I don't think there is a storage media with higher density available commercially right now - and probably not until the 64GB microsd cards becomes available.

Mass!=Weight

[halprin]

Since when was a Kilogram a unit of weight?

Re:library of congress

[SoupGuru]

See, this is why I love slashdot. Ask a silly question and more often than not you'll get an answer.

Re:library of congress

[camperdave]

A year is two AU wide, about 300 million km.

Re:Mass!=Weight

[nsayer]

Since they started making scales calibrated in kg instead of Newtons.

Re:How much does a "full" HDD weigh vs. an empty H

[Alyred]

Yeah, but that's called "voiding their bladder" or the even more unpleasant related process.

Re:Cloud computing-Clouds in Elephant Units

[geekoid]

Being pedantic is the wrong place to fail , like you did.

You failed to take the weight of air into account. Why, when you do that they are, in fact, lighter then air.
Otherwise they would fall down, and we call that 'rain'

Re:library of congress

[Ambiguous Coward]

So when some asks you "How wide is this circle?" do you tell them the circumference? If someone asks you, "How wide is this desk?" do you provide them the length of the perimeter?

I propose that your definition makes less sense than any of this. :)

Re:library of congress

[spyder-implee]

No, he asked how WIDE it was, not how long it was. So he was right in the 1st instance.

Re:and to "lightness" units

[noidentity]

Our best guess is 365KG, which is 6 million times lighter than in 1980!

What are the units that measure "lighterness"? Put another way, if it were 1 time lighter than in 1980, how heavy would it be?

Re:library of congress

[Anonymous Coward]

A year is actually 0AU wide, 6 months would be 2AU

Re:About 2 Kilos

[Kaeles]

I'm no expert in this field but I think the link that you provided had underestimated the human brain by many orders of magnitude. The human brain is not a hard drive. I don't think there is even any counterpart to it in current computer technology (maybe quantum computing?), whatever that is, so the comparison is meaningless. The brain doesn't just "store" information like a hard drive. It analyses, modifies, categorises, correlates, extrapolates, fills in missing blanks, filters and blanks out others and many other things that we are just beginning to discover. For example, a human child will quickly grasp the concept of doors and doorknobs, without any "programming" (I've had toddlers so believe me on this). This is why I think A.I. enthusiasts will ultimately fail.

People like you drive me nutters. The human brain has billions of years of evolutionary programming built into the seperate layers of the brain, there are so many built in functions that we don't even realize it in normal everyday activities. For example, your brain is "hardwired" from birth to recognize human faces, and to emit "happy juice" when the faces are familar or matched with motherly smells. Just because its not programmed after birth, does not mean that the hardware itself is not built for the task. This is no different from creating a custom asic or fpga for doing GA's or ANN's.

Re:library of congress

[nrlightfoot]

That's about half of what 1 terabyte of magnetic storage weighed in 1980, so I guess that in 1980 books still had better information density than magnetic media.

Re:There is a way!

[The_Duck271]

It is interesting to speculate about the information density of memories. Petabytes may impinge on our retinas but much less will make it to the brain and only a tiny fraction will make it into long-term storage: my memories, at least, are not 20,000x20,000 pixel video. They're more like crude reconstructions of small fragments of audio or video. As if the original data had been brutally compressed, then uncompressed and filled in by an artist applying a lot of guesswork. I would guess that we store surprisingly few bytes for each megabyte of input.

Re:Work it out in your head

[MichaelSmith]

Well, with the right RAID (Redundant Array of IDiots) scheme, the human brain could be harvested for perfect storage.

Finally I understand why /. exists.

Re:library of congress

[The_mad_linguist]

Well, we can convert distances into time intervals via relativity...

To nobody's surprise, the conversion factor is a well known physics constant. c.

So a year is exactly one light-year wide.