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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?"
How heavy is a Library of Congress?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
What are these Petabytes of which you speak? America measures data in units of Libraries of Congress.
...weighs something like 300mg/card. That's 48GB/gram, or a bit over 20g/TB, or 20Kg/PB.
Just stick the petabyte on the cloud! Clouds are as light as air!
(why yes, I am from Marketing, why do you ask?)
Since data storage is just one case of transmission channel (just sending it through time, not space) you can store the 6 Petabytes in a transmission. All you need to do is place one sender here, and one eh, let's say at the end of the Universe. As long as the data is being transmitted, it doesn't really weight anything. Yes silly question will get a silly answer :)
Nobody knows exactly how much data the average human brain can hold, but one estimate is 500 to 1000 TB. If the average adult human brain weighs about 1.3 or 1.4 Kilos, then "about 2 Kilos" would hold 1 Petabyte.
Sure. Store it in a WOM chip. They only weigh a few grams, hold literally unlimited data, and are really fast.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
And after you decompress it, you get 48 and a buttload of fragmented chains.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Thinking about the decrease in mass of a petabyte got me thinking about Information Theory and the minimum energy required to store a bit. Or rather, to irreversibly manipulate one bit of information, which I think describes the act of writing to any kind of RAM (disk or otherwise). If I extrapolate that to also mean a mass whose rest energy is sufficient to manipulate a bit, that could give the theoretical minimum mass for a bit of storage. I don't actually know enough information theory to know that value, or even if the comparison from energy of information manipulation to mass of storage is valid, but it struck me as interesting and maybe somebody knows? What's the minimum mass of a petabyte?
The enemies of Democracy are
They probably want an error rate lower than 10%.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Are you storing mostly 1s or mostly 0s? Everybody knows they don't weigh the same.
As of 10/06/03, I hate COBOL developers.
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...
and a lot bulkier than...
a few strands of DNA.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
A common misconception, and just saying it on Slashdot doesn't make it true. Clouds weigh more than elephants - much more. In fact, you can learn the weight of clouds in elephant units here.
Not only that, but clouds are usually darker than the air around them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This subject has already been discussed.
I don't think there is a storage media with higher density available commercially right now - and probably not until the 64GB microsd cards becomes available.
Problem is those methods of dropping the weight, also increase the cost (TFA assesses both).
My problem with the assessment however, becomes even more glaringly obvious when you look at the micro SD proposal in the grandparent. If you are going to have a single SD card reader and plug these cards in as needed, the weight estimate is ok. If however all 1 PB of data must be immediately available to your software, the weight gos up dramatically.
In the case of 3.5" SATA HDDs, that weight/cost should include a storage system that renders all the data available at the same time. 140 Lbs for 48 Hard drives is reasonable.
Depending on your RAID Level, 1,500 Lbs per petabyte is closer to reality. 1,700 Lbs to 2,000 Lbs per petabyte if you add the rack to the equation.
BTW: Doing something sane, like RAID, instead of JBOD or RAID 0, will increase that mass somewhat.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Air also weights more than elephants.
In fact, every square meter of the world has 2 elephants of air on top of them.
So "missconception" my ass.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Yeah, but that's called "voiding their bladder" or the even more unpleasant related process.
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.
Tell that to my doctor the next time I stand on his scales.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well, with the right RAID (Redundant Array of IDiots) scheme, the human brain could be harvested for perfect storage.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
Considering a single "frame" of vision for a pair of human eyes is estimated at 576 megapixels (truncating at peripheral vision). We'll imagine that each pixel is assigned a 16-bit hexadecimal value. That means, each time you glance at something, each frame would be calculated at a little more than 1/1000th of a terabyte. The lowball framerate for the human eye is about 18 frames/second (things look fluid). That means that every 50 seconds, your eye is downloading a terabyte of information. He'll absorb it in less than a day through eyesight alone. That doesn't include audio, olfactory, touch, or taste. His brain's data compression will downsize a lot of that information, so it will take him more than a day, but for your i/o ports, taking in a petabyte of information is a daily task.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a living organism that downloads information at 1B/sec
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
and all of this sits upon a tortoise? Amazing!
But you are converting mass into energy and energy into mass even in this case, although the amounts are ridiculously small in the case of chemical reactions, which is why conservation of mass is a more than reasonable approximation in chemistry. The mass is stored in the molecular binding energy of the battery's chemicals, and converted into the energy used when the battery discharges. For example, if you weighed very very carefully a bunch of hydrogen gas, a bunch of oxygen gas, and the water you got after combining the two (in a fuel cell reaction, which we can think of as the simplest sort of battery from a chemistry point of view), the water would weigh ever slightly less than the hydrogen and the oxygen, though the difference would be extremely small, since the binding energy difference of a water molecule versus that of hydrogen and oxygen molecules is only a few tens of electron volts, about 10^-35 kg or thereabouts, which amounts to a difference of about a quadrillionth of a gram for one mole of water. For nuclear reactions though, the binding energies we deal with are millions of times greater, and E=mc^2 is much more obvious. For instance, in the nuclear fusion of the two helium-3 nuclei to produce one helium-4 and two free protons, the helium-4 and the two protons weigh less than the original helium-3 nuclei by about 12.86 MeV/c^2, or about 6 milligrams less than if we started with a mole of helium-3 at the beginning of the fusion reaction.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
No, not just one. It's tortoises all the way down, young man.
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