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Google's Academic TB Swap Project

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hey-look-it's-chris dept.

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.'"

3 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:1TB = 1024 GB by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Should we be continuing this fallacy? by Professor_UNIX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    * 1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabyte * 1 Tebibyte = 1024 Gibibyte
    Yea, yea, yea. And you also believe a hacker isn't someone who maliciously breaks into computer systems, it's just a curious innocent person right... crackers are the criminals! Give it up. The general public is never going to adopt "Tebibyte" into the language because terabyte sounds much more fucking cool.
  3. Re:Should we be continuing this fallacy? by Anpheus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.