What Is A Petabyte?

@talmage:
"That petabyte consumes about 30 MW."

That's 30 KW per petabyte, not 30 MW. It's 30 MW per exabyte.

talmage

Am I the only one wondering what Time warner and comcast's policy is going to be on this?

Like, when we can store a petabyte, what about data caps?

Someone's going to get their throat slit xD

Jaredu

@SamburgerHandwich: like the 7 minutes of HD Video being a gigabyte? That means an hour of HD-TV is 8.5gb? I'm calling shenanigans.

pleasenopuffin

@pekosROB: +1. You are now at 2.5 internets.

@Stabio: Who's a Pedophile?

Klappstuhl

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: I still don't understand why people download porn. What's wrong with the free sites, like reddit, YouPorn, etc? Why do you have to download all that porn? You gonna watch the same porn over and over again?

Only one slight problem with that 1 petabyte hard drive: the smallest speck of microscopic dust would wipe out your entire folder of LOLcats.

MePerson

@DeusExMach: Yodabites? What the hell are those? Snackfood for Jedis?

"Filling, they are!"

@Curves: Exactly my point: it portrays the "average" guy as some brain-dead slavering fiend who's nothing but a pile of meat with a pneumatic rod sticking out. Honestly, I get more excitement out of a female solo performance with said rod, and infinitely more out of a sapphic session.

@Guymann: haha well played.

@Guymann: explanation was welcomed. I've got over 140 articles backlogged on my Google Reader cue and don't have time to analyze all comments.

I liked your joke, props to you, etc...

**goes back to tame the mountain of articles**

ReynaldoRiv

@CoolRiver45:

I have a laptop made in 1995 that can support "up to a 1.2GB hard drive*"

*standard was 600MB

Sadly, the laptop was left next to a speaker cabinet and ended up being made completely useless. Hooray for large magnets and their effects on human storage media.

[findarticles.com]

review of above mentioned laptop (premium model)

Jonathon Allen

@simbadogg: I think that's the point, it wouldn't be compressed.

@jonthomasdesigns:
1 GB= 7 minutes of HDTV? i dunno what kinda compression they're using, cuz you can sure as hell get a lot more than 7 minutes of HDTV video on 1GB. especially considering that most use h.264/mpeg4/avc

simbadogg

@Margatron: More specifically, progressive 1920x1080 HD uncompressed, with PCM audio. They are clearly talking about compressed video.

1GB does NOT equal 7 minutes of HD uncompressed video.
30 seconds of uncompressed HD (with uncompressed audio, in Quicktime form) is a smidge less than 7GB.

@ragingdrunk:

1GB does NOT equal 7 minutes of HD uncompressed video.
30 seconds of uncompressed HD is a smidge less than 7GB.

@Guymann: +1 I didn't LOL, but I still cracked a smile and it was funny enough for me to give you props!

@Justinpaulson: haaaah, lol

banmojo

@Curves: you're watching the wrong stuff at the wrong time then. there IS pron in which both the man/woman are clearly BOTH turned on, and watching them have at it is quite arousing for me, and for some women I know as well.

banmojo

@wjh31: my current collection probably takes up around 1 TB of space (over 2 hdds), and I'm quite sure I've only begun to scratch the surface of pron archival. hmmm, more research is CLeARLY needed!!

banmojo

@Curves: my woman will occasionally watch with me - ALWAYS a happy outcome for both of us. I don't like that some young women are 'preyed upon' in the making of pron, but if it's between consenting adults and they're happy to get paid for what they do, then I don't see the harm. And yes, men use pron a LOT for the most part; just wanted you to know that many many women exist who enjoy a little pron themselves, and can even get turned on by this little activity. Generally a good thing, getting turned on. :^))

banmojo

"1 GB = 7 minutes HDTV video."

This must be uncompressed. I have a 1080p rip of Blow in a mkv container that's only 8.7 gigs. It's a 2 hour movie, so that means 13.8 minutes of full 1080 video per gig. Going by that, you could get almost double the figure they have there...or over 100,000 HD movies. Damn. Here I come T3 and utorrent/emule.

The Internet is saying, "I swear I get fatter when ever somebody looks at me."

@wolfsingleton: Being from Iowa myself, I can't help but laugh. I personally call it, "the late great lost state of confusion Iowa"

@Guymann: I laughed. +0.5 internets.

@DeusExMach: Good call. Otherwise that's an assload of typing. I don't take dictation well.

Fractal the Meek

@Frood: +1

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: I loved that game!

[en.wikipedia.org]

BrockBrockman

So all you need before you blow up the world is 50 petabyte. I guess the data stored in the Vulcan High Council's mind won't be that much larger at the end of the new Star Trek?

praefector

@Frank Manda: just imagine, in 2.5 days, google could process every written book in every language ever made since the beginning or time.

kinda.loopy88

@DeusExMach: Yes, but those guys look like idiots, and there is NO bigger turn off than a moron. (The shoes the ladies wear are the best part.) The fake Os and stupud anti-plots ruin ir for me. I spend half the time laughing at them.

@Curves: lol

@paulbk: Who's a Peter File?

@Curves: Porn is a vile, sexist, addictive, objectifying medium that takes advantage of men, both on-camera and watching at home. You know how there's this whole undercurrent of resentment towards Barbie dolls, supermodels and fashion magazines because of the negative effect they have on women and young girls? Same concept, only we're not allowed to talk about it in public.

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: tube8.com has about 887 pages of 24 videos per page. If they are about 50MB each, about 10 minuites, then thats about 1TB, if we multiply that across all similar sites, and account for dupes, we are not going to get above about 10TB i imageine. But thats jsut all the free stuff, if you start considereing all the pay sites, dvds, and i assume theres some porn on blu-ray/HDDVD now, then we go even bigger. about 5GB for a dvd over 100k (reasonable, one site offers 30k to purchase, 60k for VOD) movies gives a half petabyte, plus 25GB for a blu ray for maybe 1000's (again single site offers 400 BR movies) for a few dozen more terabytes, scale up for underestimates from only looking at a single site, and from ignoring pictures, home-made stuff that stays between couples etc (esp with HD cam-corders on the rise) , and a few petabytes of unique porn sounds possible

@vx2: How much space would be taken up by an HD scan of every page of human-produced text in every language?

@jonthomasdesigns: I'd buy that for a dollar...

@thealibiguy: YAY! BREAKEVEN!

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: Yot-ta-bytes! Yot-ta-bytes! Yot-ta-bytes!

@SamburgerHandwich: You are correct...it was more like $50

[www.alts.net]

@closhedbb: Maybe it was just being demonstrated by the height of the semicircle? Or maybe you are reading into this way too much?

@earthling: why 42 and not just 40...i mean its an estimate right? I wonder if the creators of that figure were hitchhiker's guide fans...

@TallDudeFromBrazil: + 1

thealibiguy

@Guymann: + 1
you are now at: 0 points.

thealibiguy

Just think of the possibilities! Take the Milo/Natal interaction setup and switch in a teacher avatar, throw in all of written history and an audio/video library of historical moments... no more schools! Hell, even virtual tours of important places around the world. Some poor kid in Buttplug,Iowa will have the same educational advantages as as any rich kid. Oh, and a shitload of porn.

wolfsingleton

@Guymann: Agreed.

thealibiguy

I'd just like a 1 yottabyte hard drive, please. That should store the rest of my life on it without a problem, I hope. It'll be the last one I ever need, if it's fast enough and sturdy enough.

psiokinetic

Reminds me of: How big is eternity? Its the time it would take a bird to erode a rock the size of the earth if it only flew to the planet once a year, pecked it once, and flew away.

@Geisrud: Or it could be representing a form of bar graph. Just using Bumps instead of Bars, in which case it would be accurate. In a bar graph the width or area of the bar had no bearing on the data represented. Although I do agree the way they displayed it was not clear and possibaly done intentionally to make it look more dramatic.

Captian_Caveman

psh... petabyte is old school, exabyte is where it's at

Jitty

@jbrandonf likes pie. And Dreamcast: The Large Hadron Collider is capable of producing 15 Petabytes of data per second? Unfortunately, current tech only lets it record 10 petabytes per year of that info?

@parachoid: lol you really think by the time they have a hardrive with that much space we won't be able to use it. People wondered why you would need a gigabyte of data when the first gigabyte hard drives were made. I gurantee you by the time someone makes one of these someone will be able to fill it and much more.

Zomb

company I work for added 2 petabytes of storage last year and will add probably another 8 this year. That's on top of all the desktops/laptops and USB drives that get added.

And I still can't get IT to give me more than 100MB for Outlook!

ursa

@sharkync: sure it has! good to have u guys posting around :)

@jonthomasdesigns: Me to well worth $750 for pretty much all the storage you would need for the rest of your life. But I don't see how they'd do this in 2-5 years for $750...how much space would it take up? $750 is what a high capacity RAID 5 NAS costs today...1PB is just nuts.

Matt Veziris

what's cool is that, in addition to hard drives getting larger, file sizes are getting smaller. Before MP3, WAV files of music were a LOT bigger, same goes with BMP photos before JPG. I wouldn't be shocked if HD video sizes dropped from 1 gb/7 min to 1 gb/14 min within the next 3 years

Scrum

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: Yes really... all these numbers and images are really pretty and all, but please put it into perspective. All the charts in the world only help if they show us something we can relate to... 1 petabyte of pr0n is the same number of movies as the number of sperm in the average ejaculate... 4.5 petabye's of pr0n is the same number of movies as the number of sperm in the average pr0n star's sprinkler system ejaculate.

While in college 7 years ago there was an article in one of the photonics magazines in which it was stated that there was a company working on an optical hard drive. The drive is using holographic memory, which, is virtually limitless. If you break it down, a CD can actually hold 100,000gb/cm3, the only defeat to that is that the Laser tech isn't there quite yet and the mass production ability to give that HIGH of a quality CD also isn't there, hence why we are still around 9gb/cd not counting BD. I haven't read up on that article since I've been out, but I'd give it another 3-5yrs before we actually see it on very high-end "drives".

@CoolRiver45: +1 for stargate reference.

Will this be enough to store 3D images/videos?

wow...only 50Pb for the written history??

Aliens must be ashamed of us

@Cross-eyedCyclops: oh i see what did there

Carl Rosier

The sad part that is not mentioned in this chart is that the technology for actually managing multiple terabytes of data is still on the forefront of development, but running far behind stacking disks to store it.

Sure, you can buy enough storage to "hold" it, but you cannot reliably meet backup & recovery and other storage integrity issues, without the storage being extremely distributed, and in many cases, that is not practical from a people, application, and resource mgmt perspective.

Then try to transfer that much data somewhere, even if you have a dedicated OCD12 line. It still takes forever.

So actual storage is no longer a bottleneck, but actually using that much storage is not really reliably possible for many corporations, much less consumers.

drewheyman

Oh i see what you did there

Carl Rosier

@DixonCyparissus: ...now comes pre-installed with 87% lies...

...hmmm...

...I think I can live without it.

@IndustrialJones: ...we had to know SOMEONE was going to go there...

@Cross-eyedCyclops: I think we ALL know where this thought is headed...

I work on a project that reaches into the petabyte range and beyond. What makes my head spin is exabytes!

Physically, a petabyte isn't that big. At today's standards, it takes 32 square feet, a pair of 2'W X 4'D X 8'H racks of drives and supporting hardware. Each rack needs 4' between it and the next row. That petabyte consumes about 30 MW.

If you want to take that into the exabyte range, multiply by 1000. That's a million terabytes! So you'll need 32,000 square feet of space and 30 MW of power. The power is enough for about 30,000 homes. Using the (I'm told) standard of 1 ton of cooling per 3.5 KW, you'll need about 8,572 tons of cooling per exabyte.

If you're putting your exabyte storage system together using 2009 technology, you're probably not going to have it all in one place. That suggests a wide area file system and a high speed, low latency network to run it on.

Have fun with that, kids! :-)

talmage

@JawzX2: Now with 100% more employment!: scary... yet interesting... all at once...

@Guymann: ...was funny enough to me.

the petabyte: the first storage definition endorsed by NAMBLA

no way a gb cost $225 in 1998.i wonder what else is bullshit here.

SamburgerHandwich

Great job on the article Jesus. For me it's been from 5 1/4 320k floppies to tera bytes. What a ride!

sharkync

'13.3 years of HDTV content. That's approximately 58,292 movies'

OR

about 2-3 hours of immersive Virtual 3D HD 360º Movie time.

@bobojuice: I'm sorry. Sometimes I get this weird feeling that nobody gets it sometimes. I guess it's just a matter of insecurity.

But I do love Doritos, so there's that.

Can i get a 50PB HD with all of written history preloaded?

DixonCyparissus

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: too soon! too soon! let us mourn the death of the megabyte first.

@Curves: Its ok, I was only joshing about the sexism. I think that a lot of people here (but by no means all) like to play with the modern geek stereotype of basement dwelling virgins with massive porn collections, but we aren't all being serious.

I'll hold out for a vendekabyte.

thepunisher0032

@Curves: I don't know about you, but my last girlfriend's porn collection made mine look insignificant and tame.

And yet, not enough to catalogue every perversion on 4chan

rte148

@Guymann: it was funny...

that is until you decided to explain the joke in a follow up post.

-1 internets for you.

@Frank Manda: That's a lot, but there's just as much being used every day by Fortune 10 companies.

Elvisisdead

Can't be much impressed anymore, in a few years we're going to think those 2 petabyte flash drives are too small for carrying our files...

GustavoSM

@Guymann: Ha! Good one.

stryder100

@Zkdog: sorry you missed that day in high school geometry.

food for thought: So if you had 1 file that was the size of 1 petabyte... could you consider it a petafile? hmmm

paulbk

@Baldyman1966 is Holding out for a Hero: I wasnt trying to be sexist, and I agree women may have some porn, but I am going to make a guess that we account for less than 5% of it overall. Its just nature. Men are so VISUAL; thats where they get their stimuli. We women are much more comlex in what turns us on. Thats not intentionally sexist, just my opionion via observation and experience.

@earthling: that hurt. My brain is going on a vacation now...

PimPee

@jchabotte:

You can thank robin williams for that!

[en.wikipedia.org])

krische

@closhedbb: Game over fellas. We have been out nerded.

Zkdog

@jbrandonf likes pie. And Dreamcast: Youtube is owned by Google. So thus part of the 20 petabytes.

krische

@superatombomb: The internet better get faster because I'm going to be putting bittorrent through the ringer if I can store all that HD!

closhedbb

Awesome graphic, but does the "342%" graphic bother anyone else?

Looks like they increased the radius 342%, which means the white area is more like 1100% larger than the green area.

jonnythan

@JeanStork: It started out of style.

freshjulius

@Curves: Hey, I resent this sexist comment - women have porn too

@TheAlmeida: I still have a working computer in the back with a sticker that boasts of a "Spacious 6.5GB Hard Drive", and I am sure some of you can top that.

CoolRiver45

@jbrandonf likes pie. And Dreamcast: So we can finally have something that can hold the knowledge of the Ancients.

CoolRiver45

wow, 2-5 years until we get a petabyte drive!?!?!!? that's insane!!!

superatombomb

@Guymann: I thought it was pretty funny. No shame in your game!

CoolRiver45

Keep those Pedobytes away from the young bits.

IndustrialJones

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: As soon as I clicked on this post, I knew SOMEONE would mention pr0n. I never realized how much pr0n really meant to guys (or how much you each have) till I started reading Giz. I am not sure if I should let other women know, or just let them live in blissful ignorance. It worries me.

@jbrandonf likes pie. And Dreamcast: he needs to back up his porn collection.

@Cross-eyedCyclops:

The name is Peter Files...

Stabio

Whoever made this chart didn't understand the area of a circle or percentage growth.

In the first graph, it says computer usage worldwide increased 342% from 2000-2007, and they show a circle inscribed inside a circle with a radius 242% larger, problem is, this would increase the area by quite a bit more than 342%. That circle diagram actually shows a 1,170% increase.

If you're going to make a diagram using the area of a circle to demonstrate growth, make sure your data is refelected in the area of the circle, not the radius, and make sure that when you are saying something has grown by 342%, you don't just multiply by 3.42 to find the new amount, you multiply by 3.42 and then add the original amount.

closhedbb

@jbrandonf likes pie. And Dreamcast: Ultra-HD porn

Jogfrog

@JessicaAlba: Your forgetting about all of our history before we came to Earth. With our Cylon buddies, you know?

@jbrandonf likes pie. And Dreamcast: a pre loaded Tivo. It could be filled with every website, TV show, movie, & song ever made for instant access & still have years worth of storage left over for everything that you'd want to keep in the future.

Cool.. that means if you lived to be about 80 years old.. your entire life could have been recorded on 6 hard drives.

I imagine the day of a high-tech cemetery that will have video displays so you could recall the entire events of someone's life in HD.

jchabotte

So a petabyte ccan hold how many petafiles?

Cross-eyedCyclops

Well, it should help your head to know that Solaris (and OpenSolaris) is prepared to handle a Zettabyte (or 1,000,000 Petabytes) in a single filesystem. Currently it is limited to 16 exbibytes (exabytes) or or 16,000 Petabytes but that is because of the 64 bit pointers used in the OS. Changing the size of the pointers (zfs supports 128bit) would allow for its full capacity. If you want to make your head hurt even more. It has been estimated that if all of human language ever spoken were digitized at 16 bit, 16khz it would require 42 Zettabytes of storage, or 42 million petabytes.

@Frank Manda: Incredible. I would think YouTube would use more though, anybody have any figures?

jbrandonf likes pie. And Dreamcast

@Baldyman1966 is Holding out for a Hero: Yeah, I know Sheldon.

TheAlmeida

@ttk2: Hey, If you remove all the porn , you can fit it on a thumb drive.

@JessicaAlba: citation?

@Guymann: You know, People Eating Tasty Animals... PETA.

Jeez, jokes just aint funny when I say them.

Someone shouldforward ths article to Microsoft... Selling those expensive ass xbox hard drives like its going out of style...

JeanStork

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: For what?

jbrandonf likes pie. And Dreamcast

@Frank Manda: That's what stood out the most to me as well...makes sense but it's still a huge number. My brain hurts.

audioPICNIC

@TheAlmeida: Thats what they said about 640K

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: It can't be measured. Like the size of the universe. Impossible for humans to comprehend.

TallDudeFromBrazil

@JessicaAlba: They may have got that figure by including all paintings and pictures.

ttk2

If you zipped the entire works on mankind, it would probably only take about one petabyte instead of the mentioned 50.

JessicaAlba

Oh yeah, it's a lot of data. It ought to be enough for anybody.

TheAlmeida

I think the most impressive thing is the 20 Petabytes used daily by Google. That's insane (though it does make sense)!

Frank Manda

@vx2: I would assume it is just uncompressed text in a .txt file.

fAlCoNNiAn

Alright, so how much space does all the porn in the world take up? Come on, you know you were thinking it.

I wonder if "written works" are just .txt files...or some other word processor?

vx2

Id pay $750 for that !

jonthomasdesigns

I thought that a petabyte was an ironic meat sandwich.

Bring on the exabyte!

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.:Meh. I'm holding out for the 10 Xonabyte drives. I don't think it's even possible for that much data to exist O.e

Nick2