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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.

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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.

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