How Heavy Is a Petabyte?

Jon Morgan writes "Whilst heaving around numerous data storage systems to sell (they weigh A LOT!), we got to wondering: How heavy is a Petabyte of data storage? Our best guess is 365KG, which is 6 million times lighter than in 1980! But is there a lighter way to store a Petabyte?"

Comments

library of congress

[SoupGuru]

How heavy is a Library of Congress?

Re:library of congress

[weirdcrashingnoises]

according to some website the LOC holds aprox. 10 terabytes worth of information.

which means that 102.4 LOC's would equal 1 petabyte.

10,886,216.9 * 102.4 = 1,114,748,610 kg

or aprox 2,457,600,000 lbs.

Re:library of congress

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Martian, you insensitive clod!

Re:library of congress

[Smidge204]

If we take a book to have approximately 7000 BTU per pound when incinerated (newsprint is about 7,500) then we get 437.5 BTU per ounce.

So 1 LoC = 14,000,000,000 BTU or 14,770 gigajoules.

Finally! A heat unit LoC equivalent!
=Smidge=

Re:library of congress

[chunkyq]

I love Slashdot. You, sir, have validated your existence for the day.

Re:library of congress

[CarpetShark]

See, this is why I love slashdot. Ask a silly question and more often than not you'll get an answer.

And it's usually, "fuck off" ;)

Re:library of congress

[Cryacin]

What if we want a silly answer?

There's always dig.

Re:library of congress

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank God it takes your approval to validate his existence.

Re:library of congress

[t3h Odd one]

On that note, I suggest moving the White House or at least auction it off.

Re:library of congress

[Anonymous Coward]

See, this is why I love slashdot. Ask a silly question and more often than not you'll get an answer.

Unfortunately, the same does not apply when you ask a smart question.

Re:library of congress

[dgatwood]

Which brings us right around to my solution for storing a petabyte. It only weighs a few pounds... on each end... of a very long distance. It involves three lasers with insanely precise tracking mirrors orbiting the sun at 0 degrees, 120 degrees, and 240 degrees around a circular orbit. This ensures that each laser can see both of the other lasers.

Modulate the beam with the data. If we naively assume one bit per Hz, and approximate it at 10^17 bits per petabyte, and if we modulate the beam at 10 THz, the total distance around the triangle has to be about 2 * 10^9 miles, or a little over 20 AU, putting their orbit a bit inside the orbit of Jupiter. The problems of how to actually track an object so precisely and how to modulate a laser at 10 THz are left as exercises for the reader. :-D

Re:library of congress

[mysidia]

Then ask congress. They'll spend a few hundred million $$$ researching the question.

Probably hire a team of researchers to go through the library of congress and painstakingly weigh each individual book, or a certain percentage of the books, for statistical analysis.

And then ammend the final report to say the books weigh, however much, the book lobbying groups want them to say they weigh.

Re:library of congress

[rant64]

With that precise an answer, I think you might mean "exactly 32 million books" and an "average book weight of exactly 12 ounces". Personally, I think I'd just go with "11 million kilograms", unless you feel lucky. :-)

No! No! No! We'll end up with horrific rounding errors when somebody else picks up the number and tries to convert it into a measurement of angular momentum.

Re:library of congress

[YourExperiment]

Okay. I am heavier than a duck, by a considerable margin.

Need conversion to units of Libraries of Congress

[AcidPenguin9873]

What are these Petabytes of which you speak? America measures data in units of Libraries of Congress.

Cloud computing

[Sta7ic]

Just stick the petabyte on the cloud! Clouds are as light as air!

(why yes, I am from Marketing, why do you ask?)

How Sweaty is a Petabyte?

[Philip K Dickhead]

I don't know. How long have you been petting it?

"But is there a lighter way to store a Petabyte?"

[John Hasler]

Sure. Store it in a WOM chip. They only weigh a few grams, hold literally unlimited data, and are really fast.

Re:Need conversion to units of Libraries of Congre

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

And after you decompress it, you get 48 and a buttload of fragmented chains.

Re:Work it out in your head

[John Hasler]

They probably want an error rate lower than 10%.

It depends..

[Qwell]

Are you storing mostly 1s or mostly 0s? Everybody knows they don't weigh the same.

Re:It depends..

[IHawkMike]

Here's an interesting discussion on the topic ;)

Re:Theoretically quite close to zero ...

[RajivSLK]

Or you could just stick a mirror "out there". The light would quite conveniently come back at you. Or you could sneak around the other side of the universe and wait for the light...

Re:How much does a "full" HDD weigh vs. an empty H

[Darkness404]

Oh, and BTW, when a person dies does the body weigh a tiny amount less after the sole leaves?

Depends on the shoe they are wearing. On a boot, no, its a large amount, on sneakers, yes it might be a tiny amount.

Already answered

[slasho81]

This subject has already been discussed.

Re:Already answered

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, how can they mod this crap up? (In response discussed in the forums)

If you have very large files, you can compress them and then compress the compressed file etc. until the files are down to 1 byte. That should make you laptop lighter than when you bought it! I use this trick all the time so that I can save my entire music collection on a 5-1/4" floppy (yeah, I found a use for them :)

Re:There is a way!

[Palshife]

Right, but to answer the question, we still need to know your weight!

Re:A lot heavier than...

[Anonymous Coward]

and a lot bulkier than...

a few strands of DNA.

you would have to twist words to make your point!

Re:Cloud computing-Clouds in Elephant Units

[Nom du Keyboard]

In fact, every square meter of the world has 2 elephants of air on top of them.

Tell that to my doctor the next time I stand on his scales.

Re:Work it out in your head

[nacturation]

Well, with the right RAID (Redundant Array of IDiots) scheme, the human brain could be harvested for perfect storage.

Re:Cloud computing-Clouds in Elephant Units

[rjhubs]

and all of this sits upon a tortoise? Amazing!

Re:There is a way!

[flappinbooger]

I think there was a movie about this type of thing.... But I don't remember what it was called...

Johnny something-or-other....

Re:There is a way!

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

>>Insightful? Assuming you can perfectly remember 1 byte per second, you'd be memorizing for over 100 million years.
>>The human brain is great and all that, but no way are you going to store that much data while being able to reproduce it later.

Actually, it would not be quite that difficult if the data consisted of pictures. If we take the IA-60 definition of Word as 8 bytes. And a picture is worth 1000 words. So that's a total of about 137,438,954 images to memorise, which at a rate of 1 per second would take 4.4 years.

Re:Cloud computing-Clouds in Elephant Units

[cerberusss]

No, not just one. It's tortoises all the way down, young man.

Re:A lot heavier than...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, for what it's worth, the human genome only stores about 770MB, only a bit more than a CD.

That's more like seventy million bits more that a CD!

Re:About 2 Kilos

[Taddy Tadbag]

For example, your brain is "hardwired" from birth to recognize human faces, and to emit "happy juice" when the faces are familar or matched with motherly smells.

My 'happy juice' can be stimulated to emission by data from a storage device that only needs to be able to store a few hundred KB in JPEG format.

Re:Need conversion to units of Libraries of Congre

[Philip K Dickhead]

Exactly. Once you find out, the cat dies.