NSA gearing up a datacenter to potentially hold a yottabyte of surveillance data. The whole surveillance angle itself is pretty interesting, but what caught my attention was the concept of the yottabyte. The yottabyte is 1024 bytes. That is three levels above the petabyte, which itself is a million gigabytes. If that doesn’t make much sense to you, here is a chart from wikipedia that might help:http://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/yottabyte.jpg

A yottabyte would equal about 1 million times the current storage capacity of Google, or about 2000 times the storage capacity of every personal computer in the world in 2009. Here are some other fun stats I have gathered from across the web, with sources:

In 2006, the amount of digital information created,captured, and replicated was 1,288 x 1018 bits. In computerparlance, that’s 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes (seesidebar). This is about 3 million times the information in allthe books ever written.• Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually tothe digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161exabytes to 988 exabytes.
In 2006, the amount of digital information created, captured, and replicated [in the world] was 1,288 x 1018 bits. In computer parlance, that’s 161 exabytes or 161 billion gigabytes. This is about 3 million times the information in all the books ever written.
Between 2006 and 2010, the information added annually to the digital universe will increase more than six fold from 161 exabytes to 988 exabytes.
All hard disk capacity developed in 1995 – 20 Petabytes
All printed material in the world – 200 Petabytes
All words ever spoken by human beings – 500 Petabytes

Source: http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/03/enter-the-yottabyte-one-billion-petabytes/

> NSA gearing up a datacenter to potentially hold a yottabyte
> of surveillance data.

This is patently untrue, as a cursory check of the source would have shown.

The source is a throwaway line in a report from a think tank suggesting that it might be possible to access sensor inputs "to the level of yottabytes by 2015". This is very different from storage. No-one is contemplating building yottabytes of storage, or even zettabytes or exabytes.

Original source:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231