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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

4 petabytes eh. Bonus points for the first article in several years to use CD-ROMs as a unit of comparison.

> "drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime"

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That really doesn't sound like enough data for all of Europe over several years to be honest. They would surely have more than that.

Up to a handful of years ago police data was still mostly stored in CD's in a first world country like Italy (it was a fun lecture during a Computer Security in class where we had a few sessions with court experts about procedure).

It wouldn't surprise me that there are archive rooms lost to memory somewhere in Europol/Interpol full of CD's of data.

>first world country like Italy

Are you talking about north or south?

That made me chuckle too. CD-ROMs as a unit of comparison works only for a specific age group not too old nor too young.

>4 petabytes – equivalent to 3m CD-Roms...

Where are they getting these 1333MB CD-ROMs?

Also: that article's overloaded first sentence is NOT going to win any Pulitzers. And what kind of news article has an average sentence length of 29 words?

Must be those double-sided CD-ROMs?

I think a double-sided CD-ROM would be too thick for most CD readers to rotate at the correct speed.

> And what kind of news article has an average sentence length of 29 words

The Guardian usually has excellent writing -- and I for one don't mind reading long sentences. If anything, it's refreshing.

A sentence can be any length, there is no rule defining the maximum number of words that can be used to convey the point, however some experts use a sentence's word count to quantify elements of an authors intelligence, put simply its one way you can spot AI bots operating on social media.

They might be using all those Dreamcast GD-ROMs after the system's demise.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

"tapes". You may be new, but you got the gist of it.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." --Andrew Tannenbaum

And the essence is still true today. If you want to recover a lot of data from a backup service, they mail you a drive.

Who counts in CD-ROMs in 2022?

Is there a more recent storage medium with a single size (ish, 650 vs 700 is close enough)? USB drives come in all sizes, and DVD and Blu-Ray come in single and multi-layer. It's also the last time most people interacted with the media for storage, rather than buying pre-pressed copies.

I struggle to think of a better measurement unit for a lay person.

X hours of HD/2k/4k video?

That’s a bad measure, it depends a lot on the codec and the selected picture quality (and also on the picture content).

X [s/m/h] of [jwst/ska/lhc] data?

It's certainly a bad technical measure, but then stacks of CDROMs could all be super sparsely populated, those human capillaries going around the world are stretchy, etc. I think it's a reasonable metric for huge quantities of data when communicating to the general public - you can specify the movie to narrow it too.

So "the LHC produces 90 Petabytes of data per year, that's the same amount of data as streaming Avengers Endgame in 4K high-definition 40 million times! Bet their ISP wishes they hadn't offered them the unlimited data package!!" yadda-yadda?

There really isn't is there? Interesting observation.

The closest thing I can think of is 1T laptop drives.

Now I know that sounds dumb decause 1T is really just a number and you might as well just say the real number instead some other number, also, why add the pointless word "laptop"?, but the point is to make the number meaningful by comparing it to something a person actually has some concept of. I have no idea what 4 petabytes means really, but I have a some idea what a gigabyte means, and from that at least a hint of what it means that my 1T laptop drive is only 20% used.

So "1T laptop drives" is actually a more meaningful unit than petabytes.

Don't bother pointing out that laptops come with different size drives, or that probably today most people don't even have a laptop but just a phone, and have no idea how much storage it has in any real undrstanding kind of way. I know, I know. Just proves your original point.

Not to be polemic, but what's a "drive"? What's a "T"? The people who ask that are why you might speak of CD-ROMs instead.

Most people don't even know the size of their laptop drive. Only measurement they know is if it is full or not, and it can even take them time to realize this.

It amounts to ~7 dishwashers

https://old.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/comments/i7p1on/ro...

Should be number of 4k Netflix movies…

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