What’s a peta?
IBM’s 120 petabyte hard disk array won’t be found at your local Best Buy in San Francisco or Fry’s Electronics stores in Silicon Valley. The only way to get one is on special order from IBM. To put this in perspective, a 120 petabyte drive array will allow anyone to store about 24 billion of their favorite MP3 tunes.
That’s a lot of tunes.
The mechanics
The huge storage capacity of the 120 petabyte drive system is comprised of approximately 200,000 conventional disk drives that are all hooked up together and form the world’s largest data container.
It’s hard to fathom what a device this huge can do, but as an example a 120 petabyte drive is able to save the entirety of the largest backup file on the Web—the Internet’s WayBackMachine archive, all 150 billion pages, and have enough room to make 60 more copies of it.
Why?
Everyone needs a few extra gigs of storage but the equivalent of 120 million gigabytes? The enormous storage device was special ordered by an unnamed client that needs the storage to run a supercomputer to simulate real-world circumstances or phenomena.
Although this amount of storage sounds staggering, IBM’s Bruce Hillsberg, the project leader of the petabyte drive said it may become more commonplace in the future:
"This 120 petabyte system is on the lunatic fringe now, but in a few years it may be that all cloud computing systems are like it.”
In the beginning
The venerable hard disk drive technology, invented by IBM in 1956, has basically remained unchanged in its concept and operation for more than a half century; metal platters spin while a moving sensor head floats above the drive surface.
Behind the times
Computers have advanced by leaps and bounds, while storage tech has basically remained static. Hopefully, this will change in the near future as new storage medium and processes are developed and researched--because waiting over five decades is way too long to see a major breakthrough in this area.
Wouldn't want to be ya
In the meantime, as for the 120 petabyte drive device, we’d hate to be the technician who has to defrag or run a virus check on the monster.
Source: Technology Review
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