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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.

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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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