I’m writing a program that wraps around dd to try and warn you if you are doing anything stupid. I have thus been giving the man page a good read. While doing this, I noticed that dd supported all the way up to Quettabytes, a unit orders of magnitude larger than all the data on the entire internet.
This has caused me to wonder what the largest storage operation you guys have done. I’ve taken a couple images of hard drives that were a single terabyte large, but I was wondering if the sysadmins among you have had to do something with e.g a giant RAID 10 array.
When I was in highschool we toured the local EPA office. They had the most data I’ve ever seen accessible in person. Im going to guess how much.
It was a dome with a robot arm that spun around and grabbed tapes. It was 2000 so I’m guessing 100gb per tape. But my memory on the shape of the tapes isn’t good.
Looks like tapes were four inches tall. Let’s found up to six inches for housing and easier math. The dome was taller than me. Let’s go with 14 shelves.
Let’s guess a six foot shelf diameter. So, like 20 feet circumference. Tapes were maybe .8 inches a pop. With space between for robot fingers and stuff, let’s guess 240 tapes per shelf.
That comes out to about 300 terabytes. Oh. That isn’t that much these days. I mean, it’s a lot. But these days you could easily get that in spinning disks. No robot arm seek time. But with modern hardware it’d be 60 petabytes.
I’m not sure how you’d transfer it these days. A truck, presumably. But you’d probably want to transfer a copy rather than disassemble it. That sounds slow too.
This was your local EPA? Do you mean at the state level (often referred to as “DEP”)? Or is this the federal EPA?
Because that seems like quite the expense in 2000, and I can’t imagine my state’s DEP ever shelling out that kind of cash for it. Even nowadays.
Sounds cool though.
I think it was the EPA’s National Compute Center. I’m guessing based on location though.
Tape robots are fun, but tape isn’t as popular today.
Yes, it’s a truck. It’s always been a truck, as the bandwidth is insane.
If modern LTO drives weren’t so darn expensive…