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Comment by skore | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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".

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.

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.

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