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.'"

Comments

Re:Like days of old

[meringuoid]

This sounds almost like stories of scholars trading/copying books from long long ago.

According to what I'm told every time I watch a DVD, these scholars were in fact stealing books.

...why not tapes?

[Penguinisto]

I understand the whole "HDD w/ a common filesystem = more compatibility" thing, but wouldn't it be easier to simply send along some tapes of a type appropriate to the format/type that the scientific institution uses? LTO-3 can do 800GB compressed, SDLT can do up to 600... and neither is susceptible to data loss when it gets bounced too hard by FedEx/UPS/DHL/Whatever. (plus it would make for a lighter package, wouldn't require some poor IT schmuck to disassemble a server or wait forver for USB to transfer all of it, etc...)

I'm not criticizing or anything; just curious is all.

/P

Not acording to NIST

[Ernesto Alvarez]

If you want to be strict, the SI defines the "tera" prefix as 10^12, so 1 terabyte = 1000 gigabytes.

If you want to use the binary values, you might as well use the correct "tebi" prefix. NIST says you should, and it looks like the IEC, IEEE and BIPM agree.