I think I've tracked down this extraordinary claim to this 2007 DoD paper on the "Global Information Grid", where it states:<p><i>Key target GIG technologies include:
Very large scale data storage, delivery, and transmission technologies that support the need to index and retain streaming video and other information coming from the
expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks. The target GIG supports capacities exceeding exabytes (10^18 bytes) and possibly yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of data.</i><p>So someone had a vague plan for a storage centre and couldn't put a finger on how much it would store <i>to within 6 orders of magnitude</i>! I don't count this as evidence that the NSA has more storage capacity than everybody else on the planet put together.<p><a href="http://www.msco.mil/documents/_7_GIG%20Architectural%20Vision%20-%20200706%20v1.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.msco.mil/documents/_7_GIG%20Architectural%20Visio...</a>
So, per person on the planet, that would be 10^24 / 7*10^9 ... lets say on order of say 10^14 or 100 Terabytes, or 25,000 DVDs worth of storage.. for each man woman and child.<p>That would be enough to store a few years of everyones life in considerable detail : videos, photos, phone audio, GPS, financials, dna, web surfing, ...<p>You would probably need to take the complete visual and audio stream that went into a persons eyes and ears over the course of a year of their life, to start to fill that up, and do that for every living person.<p>I just wonder how much of that data they really need to sift through, in order to find likely terrorists ?
Any idea of what sort of medium could the NSA be using to store such an absurd amount of data? Maybe robotized tapes? I doubt they are doing it either in hard drives nor solid state.<p>Maybe the NSA has access to one of those high-density holographic optical storage systems we've been hearing about this years?
Wowzers.<p>Based on data from [<a href="http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2011/01/07/NSA-spy-cyber-intelligence-data-center-Utah.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2011/01/07/NSA-spy-cyber-...</a>], a back of the envelope calculation shows that if the Utah data centre was really storing even a single Yottabyte using SD cards, they'd need 90 floors of servers.<p>Going off the only public images I could find of the Utah centre, it appears to only be 2 or 3 floors. If this is the case, then NSA electronic storage is at least 30 times denser than current commercial tech.
Do I understand this correctly, that with the new NSA factility using Yottabyte-sized storage, we are now out of prefixes for sizing data?<p>I looked around a little bit. Heck if I could find what comes after "yotta"