What's A Petabyte?

[Lyze]

This is. A handy scrolling .gif guide to what a petabyte is, and the immense sizes it contains. Do take a perusal.

Spoiler

There. Now then, what do you think? The most interesting point to me is the last point, how 50 petabytes is mankind's combined knowledge. The implications of that are beautifully grandiose. What will this massive increase in our capacity to store data bring? Combined with the imminent arrival of quantum computing and the increasing competency in the fields of nano-engineering and manufacturing, what does the future hold?

Discuss.

 

[fisheye]

The increases in storage will never keep up with mankind's incredible capacity to generate drivel like this useless thread and that giant pointless gif.

 

[vadermath]

Now wait a moment, the "complete knowledge of mankind" part seems pretty amazing to me, if true. I mean, I never even knew that was even calculated.

 

[Adorno]

Isn't it just a commercial for Hitachi and/or Mozy.com 

 

[Lyze]

Is it?

I would be unawares, as StumbleUpon took me directly to the image.
Wonderful tool, that.

Nevertheless, it is interesting.

Also, fisheye, grow up.

 

[AWdeV]

They're feckin' huge indeed. Lotsa games.

 

[Ruthven]

At a glance I had assumed it was a computer storage amount of a predefined amount of child pornography. My joy was short-lived, however, upon scrolling through a page worth of an image and seeing no small naked children. 



It is interesting though.

 

[Yeomann]

Awesome.

 

[iamahorse]

They're feckin' huge indeed. Lotsa porn.

 

[Devercia]

The picture is using every trick it can to exaggerate. Look at the half-circle graph. The choice of graph type should be based on area but it was clearly measured by diameter instead, making it much bigger than it should be.

 

[Archonsod]

Try working in a datacentre.  A petabyte just means you're running out of SAN space.

 

[Austupaio]

The picture is using every trick it can to exaggerate. Look at the half-circle graph. The choice of graph type should be based on area but it was clearly measured by diameter instead, making it much bigger than it should be.

You actually looked at the pictures? That's your first problem.

 

[janlulhannes]

No way that there will be Petabyte HDD's in 5 years.
Expect to see like.. maybe 250 Terrabyte HDD's by then.

The biggest HDD's right now for normal market are 2TB.

 

[Archonsod]

Depends on whether the market adopts SSD or not. 250 Tb is a piece of piss to get into an SSD device, for old fashioned magnetic disk it's more of a problem.  I doubt it'd take five years even then. We're already looking at 100 TB single drives for next year.

Mind you, according to the 2.0 ****wits we'll have migrated away from local storage to internet based storage by then, but I suspect that prediction will change when they stop circle jerking and smell the coffee.

 

[janlulhannes]

And how would internet based storage be fast enough for games/OS/other applications?
Furthermore, I dont want my data on some server somewhere I cant reach to.

I got a strong feeling its all about control. Digital Rights Management to be more specific...

 

[Dr. John Dee 007]

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning

Sort of fits doesn't it

 

[MrRoy]

1 kilobyte = 103 bytes or 1 thousand bytes : 1,000
1 megabyte = 106 bytes or 1 million bytes : 1,000,000
1 gigabyte = 109 bytes or 1 billion bytes : 1,000,000,000
1 terabyte = 1012 bytes or 1 trillion bytes : 1,000,000,000,000
1 petabyte = 1015 bytes or 1 quadrillion  bytes: 1,000,000,000,000,000
1 exabyte = 1018 bytes or 1 quintillion bytes : 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
1 zettabyte = 1021 bytes or 1 sextillion bytes : 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
1 yottabyte = 1024 bytes or 1 septillion bytes : 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

I <3 Wikipedia

 

[Archonsod]

I got a strong feeling its all about control. Digital Rights Management to be more specific...

No, just the usual web 2.0 circlejerk. From the ****wits who simply can't live if they don't get up to the minute reports on what inane bull**** some muppet they vaguely remember disliking when they lived a street over from them twelve years ago happens to be thinking.