What's a Petabyte?

PH01

Overheard a couple of people talking about this. Not sure exactly what it is. Anyone have a clue?

Hobart

You have Megabyte *1024 (or 1000) = GigaByte * 1024 = TeraByte * 1024 = PetaByte

From the top of my head I could be missing one. But it's basically a measurement of Disk sapce. PetaByte is 1000 (roughly) TeraBytes. Big Disk arrays use them.

PH01

It's mind blowing stuff. They say that 2003 will mark the begining of the Petabyte Age. I wonder how long it will be before 1 petabyte diskdrives are available for a PC?

Hobart

Probably never will be available for the PC. They are in use today, however. MMS (Multiledia Messaging Systems) G2.5 and G3 cabn be currently spec'd with PetaByte Disk arrays. IBM and Compaq would be the global leaders in this technology, on the array side, with Maxtor/Segate providing the disk platters. They are normally setup in a raid configuration, when used in an MMS config.

DiscoStu

Originally posted by Hobart
Probably never will be available for the PC. They are in use today, however. MMS (Multiledia Messaging Systems) G2.5 and G3 cabn be currently spec'd with PetaByte Disk arrays. IBM and Compaq would be the global leaders in this technology, on the array side, with Maxtor/Segate providing the disk platters. They are normally setup in a raid configuration, when used in an MMS config.

just like 640k ought to be enough for anybody

never say never.

Hobart

Originally posted by DiscoStu
just like 640k ought to be enough for anybody

never say never.

True. But definitely not in it's current guise. But True non the less.

disco_rob_funk

For home PC's a radical change in motherboard architecture would be needed to cope with even one terabyte, but that never stopped 'em before...

I remember having loads of space on my 80MB hard disk!

RC

bonkey

Originally posted by disco_rob_funk
For home PC's a radical change in motherboard architecture would be needed to cope with even one terabyte, but that never stopped 'em before...

Would it? NT out of the box can handle disk systems up to (iirc) 16 exabytes, can't it? (exabyte is 1024 petabytes).

However, I doubt we will see personal storage reaching those heights. We're (IMHO) far more likely to have gone to "non-localised storage" by the time we might need those volumes.

As for 2003 becoming the "petabyte age", my guess is that was soe fancy market-speak for saying that you can buy exabyte storage, or someone will have bought it by then.

And here was me thinking the 10TB system I'm likely to work on in a month or three was somewhat on the large side.

jc

Capt'n Midnight

Back in the 60's yer man reckoned that every 18months you'd fit twice as many circuits on the same size of silicon. Being closer together they would run faster too.

18 months doubling time ~ 10 fold increase every 5 years
or you have to change the KB/MB/GB/TB prefix every 15 years.

Prediction storage capacity sorta increases by 1,000,000 every 30 years.

But speed is not increasing quite so fast - original PC was 4.77MHz, 4.77GHz is not quite here .. - But chips are smarter than the earlier ones so if measured in MFLOPS then probably on track.

And if Moores law reaches a physical barrier that can't be got arround (eg: wavelength of light was beaten by using both UV and inteference patterns.. x-rays) then you are on to parallel processing and the gains will be made by volume production - ram chips will get bigger but cost per B will still drop.. and processors will get cheaper but you will use more of them. -
eg: 32,768 pentiums in parallel is very old news. (not even PII's)


Note: on von-neuman bottle neck - beaten by predictive multiprocessing - ie. you don't need to wait for the result for step 1 before starting step 2, you submit likely possible answers for step 1 to each of as many processors as you have and by the time step 1 is finished you already have the result for step2 waiting, and probably have already started on step 3...

Processor speeds - well lets just say that space in the 60GHz band is being made available for consumer broadband...

Silicon - quote from the 1980's
Gallium Arsenide is the technology of the future.
- Always has been , Always will....

PS. Have a look at the Wndows specs indetail - you will find that most of the claims are for the processor and not the OS, eg: seem to remember NT4 only handles 2GB of memory for system and 2GB for programs - and similar type of limits on NTFS prevent it seeing vast drives.

"on a clear disk you can seek forever"

NOTE: There is no point in Archiving stuff to save space - if you double your storage and then redouble every 18 monthe then you should be able to hold EVERYTHING on line.

seamus

Every increase in byte storage is a factor of 2^10, i.e.

2^10 bytes = kilobyte

2^20 bytes = Megabyte

2^30 bytes = Gigabyte

2^40 bytes = Terabyte

2^50 bytes = Petabyte

etc etc

disco_rob_funk

Originally posted by bonkey
Would it? NT out of the box can handle disk systems up to (iirc) 16 exabytes, can't it? (exabyte is 1024 petabytes).
jc

Dunno 'bout that, I'm talking about supporting hardware tho', which would most certainly need to change.

RC

popinfresh

REad my signature

Capt'n Midnight

a Google is 10^ 100

and a googleplex is 10^(10^100)

but as there are only 10^90 electrons/protons/neutrons in the observable universe chances are you won't need to use these numbers too often.

comet

- Google that was the answer to the million pound question in the Who Wants To Be a Millionaire coughing episode

Kappar

It's a googol and it's 1 with a hundered zeros after it.

http://www.googolplexian.com/