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The Ultimate All-In-One Storage Solution

Posted by timothy on from the if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford dept.

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!"

13 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. I'd buy one.... by david_reese · · Score: 5, Funny
    but I heard that all you can store on there are
    ...drumroll

    Peta-files

    1. Re:I'd buy one.... by Smidge204 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I heard the FBI managed to squeeze 1000 of these into their annual budget...

      Exa-Files.
      =simdge=

  2. Petabox is ready! by KevinKnSC · · Score: 5, Informative
    Good news! The Petabox is ready!

    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.

  3. In 10 years ... by Bob+Loblaw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  4. To give you an idea of how much that truly is: by Three+Headed+Man · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :)
  5. Re:Finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, seeing as how monkeys type random gibberish,
    vi would seem like a perfect fit, yes?

  6. To bad it won't last... by gremlins · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  7. Re:Finally by foidulus · · Score: 5, Funny

    A British researcher actually did trap some monkeys inside a room with a computer for a couple days. They flung large amounts of feces at the monitor and keyboard and beat the living crap out of the box, and typed the letter s a lot. Sounds like the response of a typical user upon their first vi experience.

  8. Useless Statistics! by INMCM · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Useless Statistics! by isorox · · Score: 5, Informative

      How many Library of Congresses is this?

      50

      How many 128kbps MP3s can you store on it.

      250-300 million depending on song length

      And most importantly, how many floppy disks is this equivalent too?!

      700 Million - nearly 40,000 miles when laid end on end, or about 1500 miles when stacked on top of each other.

  9. Immortality? by Sir+Nimrod · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Transfer memories to Petabox. Sign with your public key, so everyone knows it's you. Don't encrypt!
    2. Put Petabox in shipping container, along with retrieval instructions in English, Esperanto, and Chinese (to cover your bases).
    3. Bury shipping container in Yucca Mountain. (It's unlikely to ever see any nuclear waste, and it'd be a shame to waste the space.)
    4. Kill yourself.
    5. Wait for a society (a) advanced enough to restore you and (b) rich enough to bother.
    --
    The United States of America: We mean well.
  10. Re:two words by pbox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Assuming 2 layered disks that is 10 GB per disk (feeling generous).
    100 disk -> 1 TB
    15000 disks -> 150 TB.

    Netflix has a "mere" collection of 15000 disks. Your patebyte disk is only 1/6th full.

    You upload all music CDs: 1 GB per disk (feeling generous).

    How many CDs can be in print? Maybe a 500,000?

    That is only 500 TB. Now your disk is 2/3rd full.

    Lets upload all printed material. May or may not fit in the rest.

    Then again, if you want to archive the internet: ~6G pages. 10kB each. 60 TB. each run. Store the last 16 versions -> 1TB.

    --
    Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
  11. Re:Finally by cfl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just use this:

    Monkey Shakespeare Simulator

    Maybe not as much fun, but without the faeces
    I've noticed that Mozilla Firefox seems to give better results than IE