Loading ...You heard me right! A petabyte. Do you know what it is? Can you wrap your brain around what a petabyte really entails? I have been working with enterprise tape solutions recently and some of those monster tape libraries scale up into the petabyte range. I doubt the average home user and even average business will ever generate that much data but large corporations do and they need to back it all up somehow.
A high performance desktop machine ships with say 160GB hard drive today. It takes almost six of those to equal one terabyte and there are 1024 terabytes in a petabyte. Imagine… 6000 160GB hard drives. Sure, you could fill a terabyte with some effort and a bunch of video but a petabyte? A petabyte tape could store a DVD movie with a running time beyond 40 years!
I have 80GB of mirrored network storage at home and it is about 65% full. The same goes for my home desktop. I wouldn’t know what to do with a petabyte but I want one. After all, I already have a Google. 
Spelling error intentional.
4 Comments Received
August 25th, 2004 @8:12 pm
In about 15 years, thanks to Gordon Moore, you’ll have a 80Tb disk full of movies and you’ll be wondering about exabytes…
August 25th, 2004 @10:29 pm
Interestingly, I have achieved storage happiness. I have enough. My video card though never seems to be fast enough for the latest FPS…
August 27th, 2004 @2:38 am
Moore’s law doesn’t apply to storage capacity, but rather to CPU speed. But your end point is valid nonetheless.
I remember using a 16 MHz 386 (an IBM PS/2) with a 10 MB hard drive… and I’m only in my twenties! In only 15 years, we’ve gone from 10 MB hard drives to 160 GB hard drives.
That’s 16,384 times more storage today than in 1989.
At that same rate, we’ll have 2.5 Petabyte drives in our “desktops” in 15 years!
Of course, I have a feeling the idea of a “desktop” will be obsolete by then. Nonetheless, with that much storage a commodity, think about what kind of storage large companies or the government will be dealing with! Exabytes for sure, and maybe even *Zettabytes*.
August 27th, 2004 @2:50 am
For those of you keeping score:
- a terabyte = 1024 gigabytes
- a petabyte = 1024 terabytes
- an exabyte = 1024 petabytes
- a zettabyte = 1024 exabytes
What comes next?