A Yottabyte of Storage Per Year by 2013

Lucas123 writes "David Roberson, general manager of Hewlett-Packard's StorageWorks division, predicts that by 2013 the storage industry will be shipping a yottabyte (a billion gigabytes) of storage capacity annually. Roberson made the comment in conjunction with HP introducing a new rack system that clusters together four blade servers and three storage arrays with 820TB of capacity. Many vendors are moving toward this kind of platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup XIV, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters."

Comments

Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed

[Anonymous Coward]

A yotta byte is 10^24 which is a trillion terra bytes
or 10^12 * 10^12

I thought geeks hung out here......

Re:Ha Ha have any of you jokers noticed

[Alyred]

Of course, if you're going to correct someone's math, it's only appropriate someone corrects your spelling of "terabyte".

A billion Gigabytes?

[hansraj]

umm.. wouldn't that be one zettabyte? If I am not off then one yottabyte would be a billion terabyte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta

Re:A billion Gigabytes?

[Siener]

umm.. wouldn't that be one zettabyte? If I am not off then one yottabyte would be a billion terabyte

FAIL all around

A billion gigabytes would be an exabyte. A billion terrabytes would be zettabyte. A trillion terabytes or a quadrillion gigabytes would be a yottabyte.

Wikipedia to the rescue

Re:A billion Gigabytes?

[drodal]

No, a billion giga bytes is an exa byte 10^9 * 10^9 = 10^18 so a billion terabytes is 10^9 * 10^12 = 10^21 = zeta byte

Re:A billion Gigabytes?

[Kijori]

Remember, guys, "Billion" means two different things depending on which part of the world you're in, so make sure you're not getting into a debate between an american and a brit who are both probably right and wrong at the same time. "Billion" pretty much exclusively means 1,000,000,000 over here in Britain these days. I've never encountered anyone who uses it to mean 1,000,000,000,000, and style guides require the short scale. The closest I've seen to a long scale usage is newspapers still using "thousand million" to avoid ambiguity. Anyone using the term "billion" to refer to a million million in Britain now is almost certain to be misunderstood.

Re:The new term

[ajcham]

Hate to break it to you, but they already called it that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yobibyte

Re:In a Galaxay Close to Home

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer the term lolbyte.

A list for your edification

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I emailed the "onduty editor" before the article went live on the error of their calc on what a yotta is. So much for slashdot error prevention...

Anyway, I emailed them this link to the terms in question, and post it here, for your edification. I have a post-it note on my bookcase with these terms - I think that as time goes on, knowing EXACTLY what each one is will be of some use. Until the oil runs out and we are shivering in the cold, anyway...

;-)

Here's their names, abreviations and their power of ten, so you know how big/small it is.

yocto- y 10^-24
zepto- z 10^-21
atto- a 10^-18
femto- f 10^-15
pico- p 10^-12
nano- n 10^-9
micro- m 10^-6
milli- m 10^-3
centi- c 10^-2
deci- d 10^-1
(none) -- --
deka- D 10^1
hecto- H 10^2
kilo- K 10^3
mega- M 10^6
giga- G 10^9
tera- T 10^12
peta- P 10^15
exa- E 10^18
zetta- Z 10^21
yotta- Y 10^24

RS

10^18 bytes ... isn't that "Exabyte"?

[KWTm]

If I recall: byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte.
Unless we're talking about the British "billion"?

Re:10^18 bytes ... isn't that "Exabyte"?

[dreamchaser]

Kidding aside, 10^24 is a Yottabyte.

Bigger, Not Faster

[Doc Ruby]

Server drives with high density need to be faster (seek and transfer times) to support more multiple users accessing different sequences of the disk's storage addresses in rapid interleaved succession.

But personal drives don't need as high speeds for one person's use, especially when the high capacity is for large media content objects that are stored unfragmented. We don't need to spend the money on transfer speeds so much faster than our playback speeds that it's never used. Large builtin caches are useful for real random-access data in small chunks, like programs or numerical datasets, not media.

Blu-Ray's max transfer speed is 54Mbps, though that's for recording - 48Mbps is max playback. 3x for buffering during FWD/REV scanning playback would be 144Mbps, 2.25MBps. Big drives currently recommended for personal use, like Seagate's 1TB Barracuda ES.2, get at least 53MBps transfer, over 23x as fast as the fastest it will ever really be asked to deliver. If it weren't so unnecessarily fast, maybe it would cost less, and an array of them for the same hundreds of dollars would hold more content.

With 50GB Blu-Ray HD titles to store, getting more sets of 20 titles in each HD in a RAID is a lot more important than getting them faster than they can be played.

Re:How do they get this number?

[pablomme]

Spinning disk storage seems to double almost yearly these days

That still gives 1 YB by 2019..

if you ship 10x more hard drives this year than last year, you shipped 10x more storage

Yeah, that might be it. But to me it seems more likely that the article meant something other than the "yotta" preffix

how big is the difference between a Yottabyte (YB) and a Yottabibyte (YiB)

Yobibyte, officially. It's 1 YiB = 1.208 YB, see the wikipedia link. They're still close enough in relative terms to use interchangeably when referring to orders of magnitude, but the absolute difference is a few everything-humanity-has-ever-stored units.

Hey, we're only off by a factor of 1 million

[MoxFulder]

Dear slashdot editors,
A yottabyte is not "a billion gigabytes." How about trying to confirm or understand the numbers your post, before you slap them on the front page?

The binary prefix giga = 10243
The binary prefix yotta = 10248

That means a yottabyte is 10245 gigabytes, or roughly one million billion gigabytes.