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Google's Academic TB Swap Project
eldavojohn writes "Google is transferring data the old fashioned way — by mailing hard drive arrays around to collect information and then sending copies to other institutions. All in the name of science & education. From the article, 'The program is currently informal and not open to the general public. Google either approaches bodies that it knows has large data sets or is contacted by scientists themselves. One of the largest data sets copied and distributed was data from the Hubble telescope — 120 terabytes of data. One terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes. Mr. DiBona said he hoped that Google could one day make the data available to the public.'"
Why?
Why is a Kilobyte 1024 bytes, if "Kilo" means 1000, both according to the SI and the greeks (Kilo is derived from khilioi). If 1 kg = 1000g, 1 kV = 1000V, 1 km = 1000m, why should hard disks break the pattern?
When we're talking about addressable computer memory, approximating the kilobyte to 1024 is a convenience, but since Terabyte gives such a huge error, and makes absolutely no sense for data transfer or disk sizes, it's really time we stopped this illogical naming convention just because some engineers found a term convenient 40 years ago.
Nope, that's wrong
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebibyte
* 1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabyte
* 1 Tebibyte = 1024 Gibibyte
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
I remember an article I read on this I think back in the year 2000. The was a research scientist who built a standardized platform (That is to say, a specific PC case with a certain number of hard drive bays, and certain network cards) so that he could exchange data with other universities. They would fill up the data on the networked PC, and they could ship it to any of the participating projects, knowing that they'd get back the same hardware in return.
I remember at the time thinking it was just one of those smart little details that just make working together easier. It's not some great leap of genius, but enough of a well crafted idea that it could really help.
Yeah, there have been a number of folks using variations on this theme for a while now. It's been interesting that network performance really has not followed the same performance curve as storage and CPU throughput. Add to that the growing amount of data being pushed through "consumer" pipes from people obtaining broadband and pushing sources such as YouTube and company and you have the makings for a bandwidth crunch. This of course is the reason for separate academic and government Internet paths, but it is still a limited commodity. In fact, at some universities engaging in data intensive projects, it is not uncommon for them to occupy the entire bandwidth of the university in off hours to transfer data around the country to various collaborators.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
It's not illogical it makes perfect sense to anyone who programs, well anyone who dose lower level programming. If computers were to work in base 10... Sorry I can not even go there.
If we want to worry about that then use KiB and MiB. But that doesn't make a huge amount of sense. 1KiB = 400h bytes. 1MiB = 100000h bytes. Powers of 256 would make a lot more sense.
WHO CARES?!? I have worked with mathematicians that did not squabble over these terms so why the hell are we?!? My mother who can hardly turn a computer on knows damn well that 1000 megabytes is roughly 1 gigabyte. Now lets get back to the topic. It seems Google would have some brilliant way to push a terabyte through the "tubes" instead of just mailing drives, how archaic.
WTF?
Very dumb people have convinced themselves that the entire disk industry has been cheating them out of storage space for decades. They seem to believe that if disk manufacturers printed the "real" size on the box, the disk drives would somehow cost less.
Real geeks have no problem with overloading.
Makes you wonder why some morons decided to do it in the first place when they tried to redefine kilo, mega, giga, etc... to be 2^x instead of 10^y.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
That's not the problem, the problem is, when you buy a X GB drive, you don't know what you're getting until you find the fine print. Some manufacturers provide different sizes of the same labeled drive, differing only in whether it's "1 GB = 1,000,000 KB" or "1 GB = 1,000,000,000 B"
So if you buy a set for RAID one day, the next day they may no longer stock the drive you need and your vital information is put at unnecessary risk because... what, because the hard drive manufacturers can't decide whether they want to screw you out of 7% (using 1 GB = 1 billion bytes) or 5% (using 1 GB = 1 million kilobytes, which they curiously agree on equaling 1024 billion bytes. What a coincidence that KB is 2^10, but GB is 10^9?)
Think about that for a moment before you lambast the argument for proper labeling of drives.