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Comment by pvnick | Hacker News Reader

It says the NSA Utah data center is designed to store data on the yottabyte scale. My mouth literally dropped open when I read that.

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So let's check the sources: [2] A journalist 'Estimates', probably based on the Wired article [3] Contains the word 'yotta', but says 'handle', not store (which makes sense, considering it's a lot easier/cheaper to process something then to store it). This actually references a DoD report. [4] Does not contain the word 'yotta'

Maybe NSA is doing something undiscovered, but this feels more like sensationalism then realism. I'm sure they have a lot of storage and can probably rival google on data storage, but I doubt they have some sort of magic god-like storage and search facility

Maybe we should call Utahbyte instead?

The Wired article they cite says:

> as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data.

Sounds like the yottabyte is a global/total capacity or a figure they aim to be able to handle in the future instead of a figure that they're currently hitting.

> To store a yottabyte on terabyte sized hard drives would require a million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island. If 64 GB microSDXC cards (the most compact data storage medium available to public as of early 2013) were used instead, the total volume would be approximately 2500000 cubic meters, or the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

So... how do they do it?

Who is to say they actually did it?

Assuming they were consuming 10 Tbit/sec of inbound data it will still take about 30,000 years to fill a yottabyte of storage.

In addition to the absurdity of the scale, I can't imagine you could maintain any amount of secrecy with the number of people required to tackle the technical challenges. Unless the NSA happens to employ 1000 network engineers at the top of their field.

Maybe "designed to store" really just means "we have administrative structures and software that will be able to handle such amounts of storage when we get it".

I found an article that claims a new technology could allow 10TB/in^2. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121010083826.ht...

With that, it would only require 1.639*10^6 cubic meters.

Key word there being "only". Still a pretty damn large and expensive facility. The fact that they most likely will have some sort of redundancy notwithstanding.

For reference, wolframalhpa says that is approx. equivalent to 3.3x the volume this can carry (in oil): http://i.imgur.com/jSzgKAB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dVXdESI.jpg So, roughly four of those.

just because it's "designed to" store yottabytes does not mean that it actually does right now. they're just designing the system for the future.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. With that logic I could say my laptop is designed to store yottabytes of data, just because I think that maybe at some point in the future it could. Either you are incorrect or that wikipedia article is severely overstating the truth. Edit: I do agree with you though that this seems highly implausible at best.

The difference there is that the NSA building could actually handle that much data in the future while your laptop would require some physics bending in order to store/process that much information. There's a hard limit on the amount of computational power and information you can jam into an area.

That said the Wired article just cites a DoD report which say their goal was to have Global Information Grid handle yottabytes when Utah was up and running.

> With that logic I could say my laptop is designed to store yottabytes of data, just because I think that maybe at some point in the future it could.

Except you'd probably be wrong. Your filesystem almost certainly can't handle that much space. ext4 maxes out at 1 Exabyte. NTFS might barely make it if you use GPT and oversized sectors and don't run into any unforeseen problems.

I believe it could store about 4000,000 times the current total data of Facebook.

That - is there real zinger. More striking than the definition itself.

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