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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.

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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.

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