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Comment by davepage | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting to consider the purpose of the NSA Utah Data Center given the space and cost requirements for storing phone calls are beneath trivial (3e17 bytes, < one floor of an office building and < $0.1B).

At 1.5M square feet, it could hold 344 copies of the national phone call audio database, based on the OP areal estimate.

An unconfirmed report [0] asserts the center will store 5e21 bytes. World internet traffic is 3e21 bytes in 2012

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte

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confirmed.

http://www.npr.org/2013/06/10/190160772/amid-data-controvers...

The estimated power of those computing resources in Utah is so massive it requires use of a little-known unit of storage space: the zettabyte. Cisco quantifies a zettabyte as the amount of data that would fill 250 billion DVDs.

"They would have plenty of space with five zettabytes to store at least something on the order of 100 years worth of the worldwide communications, phones and emails and stuff like that," Binney asserts, "and then have plenty of space left over to do any kind of parallel processing to try to break codes." reply

Not confirmed. Apparently, the worldwide hard disk production is around 500 million devices per year (see wikipedia). Tera is 1e12, zetta is 1e21, so they'd need a year's world production of hard disks for one data center?

Exabyte storage seems possible, however.

Maybe. But the feds have an historical fondness for tapes. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/ts3500/index.html

A mere 500 2.7EB complexes and it starts looking like real data.

Thanks for the suggestion. As far as I see, it's up to 50 PB raw data per library, and such a library needs 16 frames (frame is what we call a rack, "1,800 mm H × 782 mm W × 1,212 mm D") so it's cca 3 PB (3e15) per rack. With 2.5K racks on site (100K sqft data center space according to Wikipedia) it's still cca 8 exabytes (8e18) in the whole data center.

It is not unreasonable to assume, however, that a facility such as this would include a custom-designed media management system which could hold cartridges at a higher density than COTS (perhaps with an access latency tradeoff).

1M sq ft of total area, and 100k in the data center may not preclude another 100k sq ft of 'warehouse' containing millions of carts in shoe boxes with GS5s running around in sneakers.

Also, keep in mind that Utah has stupid cheap power (4.46¢ per kWh): http://www.edcutah.com/files/Section7_Utilities_09.pdf

Cheaper power = more cost-effective storage.

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