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What is a Petabyte of Storage?

clem57

     In the past I can remember when hard drives were in megabytes even on mainframe. We got 80 megabytes hard drives which could store over 750 floppies (you remember those .1 MB flexible drives back in '76 image). Then we started the march upward and onward to a gigabyte of storage in the same 5.25 inch drives. BTW, for the history nuts, the very first gigabyte storage was not in the PC. Where and who first built it in 1980? Change font to see the answer!

1980: IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000.

Timeline: 50 Years of Hard Drives | PCWorld

 

     It was't until 1984, when enhanced IDE was developed by Western Digital that the 548 MB barrier was broken with relative sectors instead of the CCHHR format. Then we see the gigabyte drives soon after. Soon another pioneer in disk technology achieves a density of 1 billion bits per square inch. Who was it?

1996: IBM stores 1 billion bits per square inch on a platter.

 

 

Finally fast forward to now and see a full Petabyte of physical storage in this video.

 

 

So what would you do with this much disk space???

  • 0

    My first work hard drive had 64Kwords of storage on a machine with 16Kwords of ferrite RAM.

     

    Most of our storage went to a 7 Track tape for future processing.

     

    We did a lot with that configuration.

     

    I think today people are just spoiled with unlimited storage so they no longer need to make decisions about what might actually be useful data or information.

     

    DAB

  • 0 in reply to DAB

    My first hard drive was a 20Mb monster. It made my desk tremble, it made my room noisy, and it made my Amiga look awesome. I had a few after that; if I remember correctly, 80Mb, 240Mb, 500something, and then a whopping 1.6Gb. I remember receiving that drive, looking at it, and telling myself I'd never be able to fill that much storage. Hah. Young and stupid. Right now I'm working for a company that makes software for mainframes, and the history of these machines is fascinating. You can rummage through some relics; reel tape, CPUs that have less calculation speed than my microcontroller evaluation boards, and lots of gadgets that the younger generation will never be able to understand. The joys of technology.

  • 0 in reply to DAB

    Absolutely - the amount of information conveyed by a single byte has been greatly reduced as it's all dependent upon the context it has been used.

     

    For example the ASCII byte for the letter 'A' is 0x41.  It meant a lot to us old timers but nowadays it is combined with other ancillary information such as;

         the font style

         the font weight

         any additional slope

         the general colour

         it's page or screen location

         whether it's outlined

         the style of outline

         the thickness of the outline

         the colour of the outline

         the style of internal fill

         the colour of the fill

         etc. Ad infinitum....

  • 0

    Petabyte of Hard Drive, but not storage.

     

    Makes a joke of our SAN storage solutions ....

     

     

     

    Mark

  • 0

    A PETA byte is not so big these days, even a few years ago I was architecting a health related application where just the logging was in the petabytes per year, the actual data store for the main app was way less but due to the nature and requirements of auditing with Privacy and Health information, every access had to be audited and logged and even accessing the audit logs had the same requirement

     

    Talk about massive overhead of storage, to make matters worse, we had to replicate everything to an alternate backup site, all changes were replicated in near real time (Part of the same database write transactions) and maintain the ability to perform full backups to recover in case of disaster....

     

    Oh and it still had to perform image

  • 0 in reply to Robert Peter Oakes

    Of course what is impressive with Linus solution, it does not use a SAN solution that needs a room of its own, its a single rack mounted server box... now that's cool (Well hot probably but you know what i mean)