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The Ultimate All-In-One Storage Solution
karnifex writes "Filled up your LaCie Bigger Disk already, and looking for a little more storage space? Good news! The Petabox is ready! 'The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).' And luckily, as the Internet Archive notes, it's shipping-container friendly (20' x 8' x 8'). So save on delivery costs and order two!"
My million monkeys at a million terminals will have somewher to save all their potential Shakespeare works.
But the question is, do my monkeys use VI or Emacs? That shall remain a mystery.
...drumroll
Peta-files
From the article:
PILOT STATUS 5/2004
* The first 100TB Rack is up and running!
* The second 100TB Rack will be up by the end of May
Apparently this is some new use of the word "ready" with which I am not familiar. Neat technology, no doubt, but it doesn't really look like it's ready for prime time just yet.
Will we find one of these things in eBay in 10 years selling for $10 and feel all nostalgic about those days when that amount of storage media was the size of a room?
They only have one rack, which is 100 TB.
If you gave me a 100 mbit line, it would take me over 92 days to fill it up with porn. More if I slept.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
Don't just stop at songs! Store the DNA sequences for the spice girls on it, such that years from now our decendants may know the joys of Scary Spice.
Can we say, Goooooooooooooooogle?
If you have to ask, you can't afford it. Just remember that. It might come in handy again someday. :)
Wrong
One PetaByte is 1,000 TeraBytes which are 1,000,000 GigaBytes wich are 1,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes wich are 3.35 LotsOfPr0n.
Though it says Linux is the standard OS, I'm hoping they plan on optimizing for Longhorn... so far this is the only system out that can meet Longhorns recommended disk capacity and RAM requirements. ...now if they could only find a way to fit all that into a mini-ATX tower.
Good God.
or alternatively
What for?
At least as far as the next year or two is concerned. RIAA has all but outlawed music on the computer and even so, a petabyte of $1.25 songs would cost you more than bill gates makes in a year. If you have a petabyte of home movies, you must be making porno films.. If you have a petabyte of DVD's ripped, you have several life sentences coming, even if you own all the dvd's somehow (more bill gates salary multiples). And if you have text files, then holy grapes batman, youll never read all that in 10 lifetimes.
I can see uses in the comercial realm, buying multiple units in order to backup. But if this is in anyway marketed toward the consumer, only the biggest 'mine has to be bigger than yours' geek would buy something like that right now. I'll probably have one of those on my desk/floor about 5 to 7 years from now when its affordable/realisitic for me.
From the site:
PILOT STATUS 5/2004
* The first 100TB Rack is up and running!
* The second 100TB Rack will be up by the end of May
* Thermal Targets have been met
* Systems Booted from USB Dongle
* Reiser FS running
* PC-based Router running
Maybe I'm missing something but this looks to me like they don't really have a Petabyte of storage working but plans to incorporate a Petabyte of storage with only 100 TB up and running now. Not that 100 TB is anything to brush off.
one petabyte ought to be good enough for anybody
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I know the pull is to get these things as big as you can get but i would love to see hard drives that will work for ever. Now I know everything breaks but I mean in 400 years how is anyone going to know what we were like if all the data on us slowly goes away because the hard drives or the cds don't really last very long
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
After extensive market research, it has been determined that a "buttload" is roughly 3.5 gigabytes.
In case you were wondering.
It's my favorite unit of measure.
Coincidentally, I have a buttload of porn.
"20 feet by 8 feet by 8 feet eh"
In 2010 it better be 1 by 4 by 9.
See? Those Longhorn specs are quite easy to achieve... Now let's sit back and wait for Intel or AMD to come up with a 1x1x1m slab of silicon that can melt graphite and run Longhorn at the same time!
Hate me!
1 MILLION GIGS! BAH! That isn't news unless they convert it to some entirely inappropiate metric. How many Library of Congresses is this? How many 128kbps MP3s can you store on it. And most importantly, how many floppy disks is this equivalent too?!
Caffeine Good
In the "discussion" blocks down below there's a price link.
Rack materials cost is currently estimated to be $121K for 96TB. Node materials are a just under $1450. This price does not include markup, assembly or burn-in from the system integrator and thus will increase by another 5-7% to approximately $130K/rack.
The weight of a fully-loaded rack is estimated to be 1500 lbs. That figure may rise depending on what hardware is required for rack cooling.
Power is estimated to be 5500 watts. This too will depend on rack level cooling equipment.
These figures assume no external 1G Ethernet NICs.
For a breakdown of all the above, see the attached spreadsheet.
Office manager: "Hey, Adam, do you know why our power usage might have gone up this last month?"
I surreptitiously conceal the firewire cable going out the side door.
Adam: "No, John, I haven't the foggiest."
OM: "Ok, well I'll ask Kim when I talk to her about the strange shipping container outside. Thanks."
-Adam
In his novel 3001 Arthur C. Clarke asserted/speculated that one petabyte would be sufficient space to store a lifetime's memories. (He didn't say if this was compressed.)
So, assuming you can handle the trivial exercise of transferring your memories (the implementation of which is left as an exercise for the reader), immortality is yours for the buying!
The United States of America: We mean well.
It's right there under the pictures :
http://capricorn-tech.com/
The site is rather empty right now, but it seems this is the company that will market this petabyte machine... er... box... er... whatever the name is.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I'm guessing they were referring to themselves, not google.
Please help metamoderate.
Everyone I know says giga with a hard G. The only exception I know of is Christopher Lloyd's character in Back To The Future.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
given that monkeys have basically four hands I think they'd be more suited for emacs (alt-meta-control-super-hyper-shift-q) than vi ;-)
I have been using emacs for nearly 10 years now and I swear sometimes I have been seriously considering adding a foot pedal or 2 to my setup (besides control, shift and meta I also routinely use Super and Hyper, xmodmap is great!)
-- the cake is a lie
They sing?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The current genome build has a size of 3,020,300,000 bp, at 2 bits per bp and 5(?) spice girls, that's about 3.5 GB (uncompressed).
Of course with a mostly static database like that you only want to store the diffs, not the whole thing. The bulk of the diff would be SNPs, roughly 1 per 1000 bp: 3,020,300,000 / 1000 / 4 / 1048576 that's about 0.72MB per spice girl. An if you only store the ones actually different from wildtype you probably don't need more than 20% of that.
You can fit a Spice Girl on a floppy.
sic transit gloria mundi
I'm heavily involved in a 5-6 year project to use the Arecibo telescope to search for new pulsars. The project uses a new 7-beam receiver system, each of which takes data from up to 1024 nearby frequency channels. The data is 16-bit sampled over 15000 times per second from each frequency channel. We need the time and frequency resolution to find exotic millisecond pulsars.
Over the couse of the survey we expect to take about 1 PB of data. We're still trying to figure out exactly how we will process and store it all.
For more info, you can poke around here.
If you gave me a 100 mbit line, it would take me over 92 days to fill it up with porn. More if I slept.
yeah, but if you looked closer, it's the same 6 gigs over and over again.
I'm just gonna get 1,000,000 free Gmail addresses and email all my data to myself 1 Gb at a time.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
You can fit a Spice Girl on a floppy.
Or, you can fit two floppies on a Spice Girl
"Sock it to me."
What?
Does that make you a petaphile?
[massive karma burn detected]
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
You're complaining that these hard drives won't run forever and you're right. Neither will CD's. However, I would also like to point out that the vast majority of ancient egyptian papyrus isn't around today. Also, don't start goign off on using clay or stone tablets, because they break (even the Rosetta stone is broken).
Honestly, computers are still far superior to what we were using before. It's not like we've got Homer's original version of the Illiad sitting in a museum somewhere; we just have many duplicated copies that have been reproduced over the years. You're right that hard drives fail and CDs break, but we can keep updating onto new media. Besides, when a monk drops an iota when transcribing the Bible, Jesus goes from being God to godlike. When a computer adds an iota, the checkbit fails and the data is resent.
Somebody is also going to point out that, as systems change, data can become unreadable. Heck, I had a professor who couldn't update his lab instructions because the software that read the lab printouts wouldn't run on new machines and the fileformat wasn't understood by any other software. So, want to stop our data from becoming unreadable? Well, let's just do what the Etruscans did! Of course, we don't have a clue what they did because nobody can read Etruscan. For a more familiar example, think of heiroglyphics before the Rosetta stone. It's pretty common for data to become lost and unreadable. Also, this bring us back to the solution. Along with the data, include the source code for the software that can read it. If you really want to be anal, you could even include the source to an emulator for the machien it was designed to run on.
Still, you might point out, 400 years from now, we'll still lose 99% of that do to failures of whatever nature. Once again, you would be be right. However, do you honestly believe that we have 1% of all the data that was collected in 1604? Hell, most of the people couldn't even right, so we don't know ANYTHING about their lives. I'm sorry that we can't digitally preserve our wonderous society for all of eternity, but it's completely blind to believe that this makes us in ANY way different to any other culture. Read Percy Shelley's Ozymandias before complaining about how people in the future won't know what our lives were like.
If you expect a hard drive to fail after three years (I'm guessing) but these occurances are randomly distributed (an assumption that will be true after running this thing for a year or two) you can then expect that the 4000 hard drives in this array would have about 3 failures per day. This thing would never be at full speed! it would be constantly restructuring its RAID. Also, it would cost about $300 just in hard drives (not to mention controllers, power supplies, et cetera).
Is there enough disk space left to do anything useful after installing WinXP on it?