I'll give you a much more compact way to envision 10 Pb:<p>10 Petabytes is 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 80,000,000,000,000,000 bits, divided by 8,000,000,000 bits per full human genome (2 bits per base-pair) that's about 10,000,000 cells (not red blood cells because they don't contain DNA), or about 5 milliliters! (10 um diameter on average so about 500 cubic um, so 2 million or so per ml), and that includes all the stuff besides the DNA in the cells.<p>Hard disk storage certainly is impressively compact but it still has a long way to go before we beat mother nature.<p>-1 already eh? Downmodders please correct my math or say what you think is wrong with the comparison, I note the article ends on: "How would you visualize ten petabytes of storage?".
Anyone want to guess how much data they actually have stored?<p>Backblaze's pods are a data-loss nightmare -- lots of single points of failure which will wipe out many TB of data at a time -- and backblaze has stated that they replicate data across multiple pods. Given that the 10 PB seems to be the amount of raw storage backblaze has, I'm guessing that the amount of actual <i>data</i> stored is much less -- depending on what sort of erasure correction scheme they're using, of course. (They're still much bigger than Tarsnap, of course!)
If you took all of those drives apart and put the spindles in a pile you'd have a big pile of motors. The Petabox consumes 6kW so let's be generous and call it 60kW of servo motors.<p>60kW is roughly 80hp. (I know this is a specious comparison in several ways but bear with me.) 80hp is enough power a small but highway-capable motorcycle. A single 60kW brushless DC motor weighs over 100kg. That's heavier than a good many of us HN readers.<p>Imagine a motor like that bolted to one long spindle of large platters--say the 99cm platters from a 1961 hard drive.<p>If these platters were remade with the data density of modern 2TB drives, how tall would the spindle be if this giant hard drive had a 10PB capacity? How over- or under-sized would our motor be?
I am not american, nor do we use inches here in germany but when looking at #3 it should be noted that 5.75 inches is actually the drive length, not height as they state. Well depends on how you look at it but it confused me in the beginning.
Is there any reason why 10 PB was split in that particular combination of 2, 1.5 and 1TB drives?<p>EDIT: And, just a comparison: Google processes over 20PB of data per day!
The visualization in storage pods is most helpful. Just put the drives, in their current size in a physical space you can compare to your office.<p>The skyscraper comparison is fun but misleading. The stack of drives would be very very thin. It would work better if drives were put in one box and that box was compared to a room, house, etc..<p>There can be other visualizations like electrical power consumption compared to a normal computer. How much time it would take to read/write that data. How many processors are needed to read/write that data in reasonable time, compare their surface area to the our unfolded brain, which is a large cloth napkin.<p>I think these comparisons would be more useful to people in the field than how many books would be needed to store that much data, the standard pop show example.
That's a sizable operation and difficult to visualize. I'm guessing their failure points reduce potential damage to minimal levels. At AltDrive, we use ZFS RaidZ2 with a number of hot spares. Six drives would have to fail consecutively on a given machine before any data loss... we replace them as they occur. And we have inter-H/W duplication. ZFS is self healing and makes management easy. Additionally we periodically compare the integrity of the user's AES-256 CTR encrypted data against the database records and make corrections if necessary. From our customer's and white label provider's view, it just works.
<a href="http://altdrive.com" rel="nofollow">http://altdrive.com</a>
Amazing, a discussion of data without comparing the internationally accepted unit of "library of congress". I'm more interested in how many LoCs 10 Pb is? If we built a city of LoCs, how many acres would that city be?<p>These are the questions that keep me up late at night.
My 350GB of music is backed up on Backblaze (a wonderful service), but seeing those visualizations reminded me of the environmental impact of my digital packratting. That's a sizable data center keeping my data happy and backed up.
Or about 9 (American) football fields covered with 4GB DVDs: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/10petabytes/viz" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/site/10petabytes/viz</a>
I had no idea Backblaze had gotten this popular, but I'm glad to see their business growing. If you happen to have the profile they've optimized for, it really is the best thing going.