it'd be rad if you could visualize the ratios to better illustrate the scale.
10 petabytes : 10000 terabytes :: 10000 gigabytes : 10 terabytes
10 petabytes - visualized
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#22The visualization in storage pods is most helpful. Just put the drives, in their current size in a physical space you can compare to your office.
The skyscraper comparison is fun but misleading. The stack of drives would be very very thin. It would work better if drives were put in one box and that box was compared to a room, house, etc..
There can be other visualizations like electrical power consumption compared to a normal computer. How much time it would take to read/write that data. How many processors are needed to read/write that data in reasonable time, compare their surface area to the our unfolded brain, which is a large cloth napkin.
I think these comparisons would be more useful to people in the field than how many books would be needed to store that much data, the standard pop show example.
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#23My 350GB of music is backed up on Backblaze (a wonderful service), but seeing those visualizations reminded me of the environmental impact of my digital packratting. That's a sizable data center keeping my data happy and backed up.
Off topic, but what do you listen to that takes up 350GB? Is everything in FLAC?
A fair collection of (DJ) mixes (live or not) and sets can easily account for a few hundred gigabytes. Take Tiesto's "Club Life" and Armin Van Buurin's "A State of Trance" for example. With each set being around two hours or more of high quality mp3, with the former having over 300 episodes, and the latter having around a hundred. These things add up quickly.
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#24I'll give you a much more compact way to envision 10 Pb: 10 Petabytes is 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 80,000,000,000,000,000 bits, divided by 8,000,000,000 bits per full human genome (2 bits per base-pair) that's about 10,000,000 cells (not red blood cells because they don't contain DNA), or about 5 milliliters! (10 um diameter on average so about 500 cubic um, so 2 million or so per ml), and that includes all the…
I see many debatable points: - Blood is far from being that dense, but I'll assume you mean to calculate a theoretical limit. - If you use the whole of a cell's DNA to encode information, the cell will die. It can't be used to freely encode information like a hard disk. - There is no way to retrieve information in this system. This is a bit like packing a large amount of extremely high-density magnetic platters in a…
- There is no way to retrieve information in this system.
DNA is natively a content addressable storage system, due to natural base-pairing. But to first address your question in your edit: think of DNA as a pair of singly-linked lists, each with an alphabet of four characters. Each singly-linked list is the "reverse complement" of the other: the reverse sequence with an A-T swap and a C-G swap. At each position there's 2 bits of information, and the other linked list allows for some redundancy.
To probe for information in a DNA database, you construct the reverse-complement of the desired bit of information, attach a marker to your probe (such as a fluorescent dye, biotin, magnetic bead), then physically mix it in to your DNA database. A couple cycles of melting and cooling, and your probe will eventually find it's target DNA.
Of course, the thermodynamics of a physical database like this aren't particularly great. I'm not sure of the asymptotic behavior; my intuitive guess is lg(N) just like in B-trees or what have you, but I've never run the numbers or heard of anyone else running it. Also, the constant in front may be just a few orders of magnitude larger than our current systems :)
Reading DNA is getting super cheap these days, and the pace of DNA sequencing technology makes Moore's law look positively wimpy. There are about 30 serious startups working on technologies that fall into a few broad categories, and some like PacBio had an IPO this year. Writing DNA is a much more difficult challenge, I don't know of many people looking into it yet. The market for writing DNA isn't nearly as obvious as it is for sequencing. Of course if it becomes feasible to write your own pets/plants/children instead of breeding them, the market may explode.
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#25I am not american, nor do we use inches here in germany but when looking at #3 it should be noted that 5.75 inches is actually the drive length, not height as they state. Well depends on how you look at it but it confused me in the beginning.
They could be trying to make this seem more impressive by standing the hard drives up instead of laying them flat.
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see many debatable points: - Blood is far from being that dense, but I'll assume you mean to calculate a theoretical limit. - If you use the whole of a cell's DNA to encode information, the cell will die. It can't be used to freely encode information like a hard disk. - There is no way to retrieve information in this system. This is a bit like packing a large amount of extremely high-density magnetic platters in a…
- There is no way to retrieve information in this system. DNA is natively a content addressable storage system, due to natural base-pairing. But to first address your question in your edit: think of DNA as a pair of singly-linked lists, each with an alphabet of four characters. Each singly-linked list is the "reverse complement" of the other: the reverse sequence with an A-T swap and a C-G swap. At each position ther…
There are several companies that will "write" arbitrary sequences of DNA, to order. One is http://www.mrgene.com , but at $0.39/bp it is still much more economical to isolate and amplify desired sequences using PCR.
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#27Anyone want to guess how much data they actually have stored?
Backblaze's pods are a data-loss nightmare -- lots of single points of failure which will wipe out many TB of data at a time -- and backblaze has stated that they replicate data across multiple pods. Given that the 10 PB seems to be the amount of raw storage backblaze has, I'm guessing that the amount of actual data stored is much less -- depending on what sort of erasure correction scheme they're using, of course. (They're still much bigger than Tarsnap, of course!)
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#28My 350GB of music is backed up on Backblaze (a wonderful service), but seeing those visualizations reminded me of the environmental impact of my digital packratting. That's a sizable data center keeping my data happy and backed up.
I wonder how many thousands of people are paying them to back up stuff they could easily redownload. Great business model if they de-dupe internally.
they encrypt all data and i dont think it would be wise of them analyzing their clients data for dupes...if somebody would get to know that their business would be gone.
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see many debatable points: - Blood is far from being that dense, but I'll assume you mean to calculate a theoretical limit. - If you use the whole of a cell's DNA to encode information, the cell will die. It can't be used to freely encode information like a hard disk. - There is no way to retrieve information in this system. This is a bit like packing a large amount of extremely high-density magnetic platters in a…
> - Blood is far from being that dense, but I'll assume you mean to calculate a theoretical limit. There are more ways of having cells arranged, I explicitly mentioned red blood cells because they are exceptional in not containing any DNA, but any chunk of tissue with that volume would do. > If you use the whole of a cell's DNA to encode information, the cell will die. It can't be used to freely encode information li…
> There actually is, the information retrieval mechanism that is used to 'express' the DNA (actually, the RNA, an 'unzipped' strand of DNA, but who's counting) is a wonderful little nano machine called a ribosome, it's probably the most amazing structure that I know of outside of the DNA itself.
Actually I was going to say that one way to think of using that information is to compute with it, in other words, an organism is simply the result of a computation on its DNA.
Re: 10 petabytes - visualized
#30Amazing, a discussion of data without comparing the internationally accepted unit of "library of congress". I'm more interested in how many LoCs 10 Pb is? If we built a city of LoCs, how many acres would that city be?
These are the questions that keep me up late at night.