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1. Posts about Gizmodo as of July 8, 2009 » The Daily Parr 08.07.09 / 8am

   [...] about Gizmodo as of July 8, 2009 How Heavy Is A Petabyte? – matrixstore.net 07/08/2009 It’s sometimes hard to visualise just how much disk technology has [...]
2. Freeman 08.07.09 / 12pm

   1 PB worth of 8GB microSD cards (0.5 g per card) masses 65.536 kg.

   (using Real petabytes and gigabytes, based on powers of 2, not powers of 10.)
3. Suricou Raven 08.07.09 / 2pm

   You could achieve the highest densities by using an ion beam or pulsed laser etching device, or even a tunneling microscope – you could store one bit per atom then. The downside is that it would take a quite impractical time to write or read, as rates would be measured in bits per second.

   Even this isn’t even close to the limits imposed by physics though.
4. Suricou Raven 08.07.09 / 3pm

   Oh, for reference, this is what a scanning tunneling microscope can do:
   http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/images/4506VV1003.jpg

   Yes, those bumps are individual atoms.
5. Gordon 08.07.09 / 3pm

   Why not use 32GB micro SDHC cards? 16.4kg or about 36 pounds.
6. Ross Presser 08.07.09 / 3pm

   It’s not quite fair to compare microSD cards with complete drives. You should add the weight of the necessary card readers — not including power or connector cables, but including one card reader per card.
7. James Paige 08.07.09 / 3pm

   I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations, and if you could store 1 petabyte in DNA, I think it would weigh somewhere around 1.1358 micrograms
8. Sean 08.07.09 / 3pm

   Re: Ross, your comment makes no sense. The article does not include drive controllers for the hard drives, so why should cards include card readers? There is no such premise that all the data is required to be accessible simultaneously.

   I would agree though that it would be more interesting to include the weight of equipment that could access the petabyte of data in serial or random fashion.
9. Gordon 08.07.09 / 3pm

   For online access, you could print those flash chips on some flexible PCB and multiplex n chips. One controller per 1000 micro sdhc cards worth of flash chips should be enough.

   This shouldn’t add to weight much, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually decreased the weight, because we don’t need connectors and plastic cases anymore.
10. Tyler 08.07.09 / 3pm

    I think your math on the weight of the IBM 3380 is wrong. It weighed about 550lbs / 275Kg. 550 * 1,000,000 / 2000 = 275,000 Tonnes.
11. Pedro 08.07.09 / 4pm

    Gordon, that’s called an SSD drive

    Freeman, that’s 65536 grams, ie, 65Kg.
12. Jon 08.07.09 / 4pm

    Tyler agreed: 250,000 tonnes (one 0 too many on the slide). Also there was a 2.5GB 3380 I believe, which would have made that a 100,000 tonne solution.

    I still don’t want to carry that!

    Now. How about a 1970 comparison
13. Vito 08.07.09 / 4pm

    Tyler: The IBM 3380 is 88 lbs. I know. I have three of them. Anyone wanna buy one?
14. Bob 08.07.09 / 4pm

    Pedro, I assume that Freeman was actually correct with his calculation. He’s likely from a part of the world where the period separates the integer from the fractional part, rather than marking the thousands place.
15. Slightly 08.07.09 / 4pm

    “One million drives, weighs 2,500,000 Tonnes” … So 1 drive weighs 2.5 Tonnes, right? … Ah, Tyler mentioned it already.
16. James M 08.07.09 / 4pm

    LTO-4 Tape, including the plastic cassette shell, is about a quarter of a gram per gigabyte, uncompressed. This is much less mass per gigabyte than your Western Digital drives. It’s also much faster to read and write.

    By the time you’ve written your petabyte to your disk drives, I suspect the next generation of storage will be at hand…
17. Jon 08.07.09 / 4pm

    James: faster? This is a disk based archiving website – I can’t possible let that slide
    We write to our clusters at over 1GB/s (bytes not bits), and have millisecond random access.. anyway back to the point in hand… 2 LTO4 tapes would indeed weigh less than 1 2TB HDD.
18. Andrew 08.07.09 / 5pm

    32GB microSDHC cards don’t exist yet, 16GB is the maximum size. This is of course likely to change soon…
19. Jon Bohack 08.07.09 / 6pm

    I seen the link off Slashdot and remember these drives from back in the day. I think we need a web page that divides 1PB into the capacity of the drive entered and multiplies that against the weight of a single device. So 1PB of 8GB SD @ .5gr = 65.536kg… You could even add a price, sounds like a website theme.
20. derek 08.07.09 / 8pm

    I was wondering what the Petabyte of data would weigh? not the storage but the data?
21. NPT 08.07.09 / 9pm

    Yeah Sorry Guys .. I get a bit speedy at times.. was getting all zero’d up!

    Any it’s HEAVY!

    N
22. Nathan 08.07.09 / 9pm

    Sean: Modern hard drives have the controller built-in. Not including the card readers in the measurement would be like measuring only the platters of the HDD, not the entire device.
23. Seth Mos 08.07.09 / 10pm

    Surprisingly, 1PB of disk with Corsair P256 solid state disks still weighs in at 327Kg.

    You would require 4096 of these solid state drives at 80 grams each to make this volume.

    You might be able to fit them in a big shopping trolly probably powered by a single battery.

    Now if they only made raid controllers with that many ports.
24. MatrixStore » Blog Archive » How Heavy Is A Petabyte? | Quality Solutions 08.07.09 / 11pm

    [...] Read more from the original source:  MatrixStore » Blog Archive » How Heavy Is A Petabyte? [...]
25. James 09.07.09 / 12am

    Nathan – let’s make them SDHC Plus cards then. Those have an integrated USB controller.
26. Ryan 09.07.09 / 12am

    Surely Bluray would be the lightest way to store 1PB?

    Their weight would be similar to flash storage but the data held would be ~7x as much.
27. Tom 09.07.09 / 1am

    To comment on the controller vs non-controller drive issue, i believe that microSD cards all have a SPI interface (commonly used between microcontrollers and other chips), which could allow for addressing multiple cards with only one unique signal line per card (rest are shared). Though it would probably be more efficient to just use some chip scale packages on a PCB.
28. Suricou Raven 09.07.09 / 1am

    Seth, they do. SAS controllers can take up to, if I recall correctly, 16383 devices (2^16, minus the ID needed for the controller itsself). Although none have a full 4096 ports, they do suppose the use of expanders to connect up to 128 drives to a single port. You can even connect an expander to an expander. If you wished, you could connect all 4096 drives to a single port – though to improve performance, you’d probably want to connect as many ports as the controller supports.

    Conveniently, SAS is designed to allow SAS and SATA drives to be mixed – the idea being to use SAS for the highest performance tasks and SATA for lower-cost, higher-capacity but slower drives. So you can just use SATA SSDs and a SAS controller.

    The end result of this would be something the size of a fileing cabinet with wheels. On one side would be a single external SAS connector with which to connect up to a computer (One connector carrying four ports) and a power socket. A petabyte in a box.
29. MatrixStore » Blog Archive » How Heavy Is A Petabyte? | All About Solid State Drives (SSD) 09.07.09 / 2am

    [...] more… Tags: 65536-grams, big-shopping, corsair, slide, solid state drive, solid-state, still-weighs, volume [...]
30. How much does the internet weigh? @ Technology News 09.07.09 / 2am

    [...] the question has arisen again in a slightly different form: how much does a petabyte weigh? A quick and dirty graphic suggests 365kg. That means, if recent estimates that the net contains around 500bn gigabytes are correct, that [...]
31. Gabe 09.07.09 / 4am

    Nathan – SD cards/disks are no more bare-bones than SATA drives. SD cards are not raw NAND chips.

    The cheapest solution for hooking up either SD and SATA would be essentially the same: Get a MASSIVE multiplexer and hook every SATA/SD disk up to it. Then you would select the disk needed with the multiplexer. Then you would only need one SATA port or SD reader.
32. Gabe 09.07.09 / 5am

    Since SD supports SPI-mode, a single SPI controller could host thousands of SD cards.
33. Gary Bickford 09.07.09 / 5am

    I used to ask “what does a bit weigh” as a rhetorical question. Two years ago, reading up on black holes I discovered that a bit does not have mass but it does have area.

    This relates to the size of a black hole, conservation of entropy/information, and the surface area of the event horizon. As it turns out, a bit requires one Planck area (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units), or about (1.6E-35)^2 meters,.
34. How heavy is a useable Petabyte? - Geek News Central 09.07.09 / 6am

    [...] team at MatrixStore have a post up calculating the weight of a petabyte of storage today compared to 1980.  Needless [...]
35. nawitus 09.07.09 / 8am

    You can fit about 3840 letters on a4 paper with font 12, each letter holds one byte. Since each a4 paper weighs 5grams, on paper a petabyte weighs 5 * 10^12 kilograms meaning 5 petagrams.
36. nawitus 09.07.09 / 8am

    Correction to earlier post: You can fit about 3840 letters on a4 paper with font 12, each letter holds one byte. Since each a4 paper weighs 5grams, on paper a petabyte weighs 1.3 teragrams.
37. JD 09.07.09 / 8am

    @ How much does the internet weigh.
    You’re assumption could definately not be that simple, due to the fact that most of todays internet is dynamic content.

    A database holding 2GB could easily be displayed using a 1MB script as 20GB.
38. Terabyte para quê? O negócio agora é Petabyte « Geeknologia – Jornalismo Digital e uma pitada de nerdice 09.07.09 / 8am

    [...] pesa um Petabyte? – A empresa britânica MatrixStore brinca em seu blog com o avanço das tecnologias de armazenamento nos últimos 30 anos. Em duas montagens [...]
39. Bruce 09.07.09 / 8am

    32 GB SDHC cards exist: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208480
    You’d need 32,768 of these to make a petabyte. These would weigh more than microSD cards, though. Probably more like 10g, so the weight would be comparable to the hard drives. Incidentally, I’m not convinced microSD cards only way 0.5 gram. I would’ve expected 2.0.
40. John 09.07.09 / 7pm

    The question of disk drives vs memory cards is just arguing about the packaging.

    Einstein showed that mass is equivalent to energy.

    It has also been shown that information is equivalent to energy, so we should be able to directly convert 1PB of data to an equivalent mass and say what it should weigh without the packaging.
41. Sytek on Friday » Doctor Recommended 10.07.09 / 12am

    [...] – What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System? (Slashdot) – How Heavy Is A Petabyte? (MatrixStore) – Canon unveils augmented reality dinosaur show in Japan (Engadget) – Q&A: Robotics engineer [...]
42. How much does the internet weigh? - Front Page News - NewsSpotz 10.07.09 / 2am

    [...] the question has arisen again in a slightly different form: how much does a petabyte weigh? A quick and dirty graphic suggests 365kg. That means, if recent estimates that the net contains around 500bn gigabytes are correct, that [...]
43. meneame.net 10.07.09 / 2am

    ¿Cuanto pesa un petabyte? [ENG]…

    Explica cuanto pesaba un petabyte en 1980 y en la actualidad…
44. Juan Ramon Fernandez 10.07.09 / 3am

    Anyone has notified that 500 disks of 2 TB are 1000 TB not 1024.

    The capacity is used in base 2 units of 10 bocks. That makes a 2^10 to change to next. You need 1024 GB to get a TB and you need 1024 Tb to get a PB.
    With what you used, you need 1024 / 2 = 512 disks to get 1 PB on 2 GB disks.
    And you need 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 disks to get a PB from 1 GB disks.

    I know aren’t rounded numbers but when you put an scale you must use real numbers if you can although it gives you extrange numbers
45. Kevin Blackham 10.07.09 / 7am

    At Mozy our latest racks store about 500TiB of data per rack. That’s real, formatted capacity in base-2. A rack weighs 1200 pounds or so. Therefore, random-access, usable space including CPU, network, controllers, power and air-moving is 1.2 imperial tons for us to store 1PiB.

    Shameless plug time (I’m tech-ops, not marketing btw). We recently made up some nice graphics describing how large a petabyte is. Blog link:
    http://mozy.com/blog/misc/how-much-is-a-petabyte/
46. How heavy is a useable Petabyte? | Bull Quake 11.07.09 / 6pm

    [...] team at MatrixStore have a post up calculating the weight of a petabyte of storage today compared to 1980.  Needless [...]
47. Cecil 30.07.09 / 8am

    The new WD 1TB Scorpio Blue 2.5″ hard drives weigh 117 grams each.

    1000 of them weigh 117kg, less than 1/3 of the 3.5″ 2TB drives!