How Compact Could 10 Petabytes Get in 2022?

[YoungBlade]

The other day I was reading a spy novel (that takes place in the present day). In it, a group of organized thieves break into a facility that's making a new prototype aircraft to steal information and disrupt its production. Explosions go off, one of the researchers dies, etc. When the CIA agents are analyzing the footage of the break in, the tech nerd one says that a device, about the size of a shoe box, is a storage device, and estimates that it probably holds 10 petabytes.

 

Instantly, my immersion was broken. I know the author probably just wanted to use a big number to demonstrate how high tech these thieves are, and how much data this research team has, but the idea of 10 petabytes fitting into a shoe box using today's technology seemed ridiculous. However, just for fun, I tried to think of how such a thing would even be possible.

 

Obviously, things like LTT's Petabyte Project use huge rack servers that are way bigger than a shoe box and only hold a measly 1 petabyte of data. And even with ExaDrives at 100TB each in a 3.5" form factor, you would need 100 of them to store 10 petabytes. As impressive as that storage density level is, it's not going to fit into a shoe box, or even in a single server rack.

 

Now, they do make 1TB MicroSD cards now, and you could fit 10,000 of them in a shoe box, but that wouldn't account for the hardware needed to use 10,000 MicroSD cards in a giant storage array, which would certainly require more space than a shoe box. But even if it didn't, I'm not sure if such an array is even possible - there are limits to how many drives a system can handle in practice. Even on the software side, I don't know if an OS could simultaneously have 10,000 drives connected without running into issues.

 

So, was I right to think that there's no way to fit 10 petabytes in a storage device the size of a shoe box with today's technology? And if that is impossible, how compact could 10 petabytes get?

[Kilrah]

The same tech as a 1TB microSD but scaled up (as in, not 10000 cards but a small number of way bigger chips made for the purpose) might do.

[Robchil]

it's fiction.. but they have been testing with diferent materials that are supposed to have posibilities for extreme storage sizes.. 

 

[YoungBlade]

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

The same tech as a 1TB microSD but scaled up (as in, not 10000 cards but a small number of way bigger chips made for the purpose) might do.

In theory, that might be possible, but I do wonder about whether it would be feasible in practice. If it were possible, though, why wouldn't some company have made a petabyte drive? Even if the read/write was only 50MB/s, that's still not horrible compared to some tape drives, and that level of density could allow for easily, covertly, and securely transporting massive amounts of data.

[Kilrah]

13 hours ago, YoungBlade said:

why wouldn't some company have made a petabyte drive? Even if the read/write was only 50MB/s

It would take 230 days to fill at that rate...

[YoungBlade]

59 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

It would take 230 days to fill at that rate...

Fair, but how much of an issue that is would depend on the use case. For example, you can record 4K video at that rate, which is the equivalent of 16 540p video streams. So you could record a year's worth of video for over a dozen cameras on a single drive without having to delete anything. This would work with any type of data that's generated over an extended period of time.

[Needfuldoer]

How dense can we get digital data storage? We can look at this xkcd "What If" for inspiration:

 

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

 

Let's make some assumptions:

- A MicroSD card weighs 250mg

- A MicroSD card measures 11 mm x 15 mm x 1 mm

- A 1 TB MicroSD card costs $150 USD

- All we care about is raw storage density. Cost, access time, and keeping track of what's on each and every physically identical data flake will be disregarded.

- We're working in the frictionless void of a physics textbook, so devices nest together with no wasted space

- Ignore all filesystem level file compression, including magic LTO compression

 

One kilogram of 1 TB MicroSD cards would:

- Consist of 4,000 cards

- Hold four petabytes

- Cost $600,000

- Measure about 116 mm x 240 mm X 16 mm (A slab made up of 16 cards in each dimension)

 

We can scale that up to our target of 10 TB capacity by tripling it:

- Three kilograms

- 12,000 cards

- 12 petabytes of data capacity

- $1,800,000

- 116 mm x 240 mm x 48mm

 

Compare that storage density to LTO-9 tape:

- 18 TB raw capacity

- 102 mm x 105 mm x 21 mm

- 200g weight

- $220 new

 

You would need 667 tapes to store 12 PB.

 

Or a Seagate IronWolf Pro 20 TB hard drive:

- 20 TB raw capacity

- 102 mm x 147 mm x 26 mm

- 670 g

- $630 USD new

 

It would take 600 of them to hit 12 PB.

 

So as long as you don't care about actually accessing the data, you could easily get 12 petabytes in a shoebox using today's technology.

 

Obviously this is completely impractical for many, many, many reasons. But it's a fun thought experiment!