A Yottabyte of Storage Per Year by 2013

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."

Re:A billion gigabytes?

[gstoddart]

I believe a "yottabyte" is 1 billion petabytes, not gigabytes.

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:Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed

[lucas_picador]

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.

How much is currently being shipped annually?

[kaos07]

Considering the fact that I'm just a regular user who doesn't run a server or data centre or anything particular storage intensive (relatively speaking) and I bought a 1TB (1000GB) last year, I'm wondering whether this claim is as "WOW!" as it appears to be on the surface. Surely there's at least 1 million users (1 million x 1 thousand = 1 billion GB, or 1 yottabyte) who've bought a 1TB hard drive? Or even 10 million who've bought 100GB hard drives. And this is just home users mind you. There must be thousands, if not millions, of companies around the world with servers and data centres with plenty of gigabytes of storage being purchased every year.

Re:New prefixes

[VeNoM0619]

No kidding, looking at how we got the prefixes [jamesshuggins.com] in the first place we may run out of greek/latin words.

Hopefully it will come down to unobyte, dosbyte, or something with a number convention, otherwise we might be hearing "crazybyte" or "uberbyte".

Impressed

[goombah99]

So If a billion people owned 100 Yotta bytes that's 10^9*10^9*10^9*100*9 = 8E30 bits

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